Authors: Mark Browning
Kaufman disavowed any linkage with the film, unhappy that Clooney publicly praised his script and then made changes without the writer's involvement. However, this is still an ambitious film, in content, tone, and style. Sigel states his belief that, even acknowledging the film's commercial performance (it took only $16 million in the United States), over time the film will be reappraised and find its audience as a cult film: a view with which this writer would agree.
This film remains something of an anomaly in Clooney's work. It is part of his collaboration with Soderbergh, partly funded by their production company Section Eight, and reflects an ongoing seriousness about films that without his interest might not otherwise get made. What makes this example different is its complete immersion in a particular style. Despite the fact that a number of Clooney films are set in the past, this film is the only one to attempt to overtly use the exact film style of that period (something Clooney only touched on with
Leatherheads
).
As we see Churchill, Truman, and Stalin draw up a new map of Europe in postwar Berlin, so the hero Captain Jake Geismar (Clooney, uneasily blending the role of jaded military officer and crusading journalist) is attempting to map out the boundaries of relationships, past and present. He cuts a subdued figure with trousers slightly too short for him, emphasized in occasional long shots, complete with the ubiquitous cigarette, which he is more often holding or stubbing out than actually inhaling.
Soderbergh goes beyond merely alluding to the style of wartime movies; this is not a pastiche or a parody. For the DVD release, Soderbergh uses
the aspect ratio of the time of 1.33:1 and is actively re-creating the look of a 1940s film for a serious rather than ironic purpose. The film appears in black-and-white but was shot in color because this allows a faster film speed and the use of green screen technology. The basic lighting codes evoke the 1940s use of chiaroscuro pools of light and shadow, like the first meeting of Jake and Lena (Cate Blanchett), where she is turned away, her face half in shadow, and he has a bar of light that plays across his eyes (also when he finds her file later).
Wide-angle lenses with deep focus allow for some composition in depth and means there is little sudden movement through the frame as the choice of lens would have a distorting effect on such action, like Clooney emerging from behind a tree at the discovery of the body.
Incandescent lighting throws real shadows, which produce shots that are harder to match that those taken on sets flooded with lighting, but it also means that Soderbergh, who often edits his own movies too (under the name Mary Ann Bernard) and acts as his own cinematographer (in the name of Peter Andrews) had a rough cut ready within a couple of days.
There are other small anachronistic devices like boom mikes, which necessitate a slightly stronger delivery and projection for the sound to carry, self-conscious low angles (like when Jake walks to Lena's flat), blurred vertical wipes to signal transitions device, and an iris narrowing on the name of Schaeffer (Dave Power), who knowingly orders Tully (Toby Maguire) as Jake's driver, hoping that by putting the two together they would lead him to Emil Brandt (Christian Oliver). The early sequence of Tully and Jake in the jeep is initially shot from the backseat with the two placed in the dead space of the T-frame, delivering their dialogue facing away from the camera, like very early sound films. The crude back projection here and later when Lena meets Bernie Teitel (Leland Orser) distracts from the dialogue, which is important in both scenes.
Like the extreme low angle of Lena as she passes a picture of Stalin, there are self-conscious stylish flourishes, like the symbolism of the cracked photo of Emil, a broken individual who has lost his moral compass, as well as suffering an estranged marriage. As Jake is left on the landing looking at the departing figure of Lena, he is framed against a huge hole in the wall behind him, featuring a moonlit sky, which seems the kind of painterly picture composition at odds with the dominant style here. The choice of a cinema as a place for Lena to meet Emil (an addition to Joseph Kanon's 2001 novel of the same name) seems designed for its iconic filmic potential rather than a practical arrangement with shafts of light from the projection room and the cliché of rising smoke and a crushed cigarette as evidence of someone watching them.
The echo in the final scene of Michael Curtiz's
Casablanca
(1942) is overt in the promotional material for the later film. We have a rain-soaked night scene at an airport, featuring the separation of lovers, one of whom is an American, against the background of the Second World War. However, the woman boards the plane alone as she is unworthy of his love, a fact Jake finally realizes as she confesses the full extent of her collaboration, betraying 12 Jews in exchange for her own survival. Despite a kiss on the cheek and a final exchange of looks as she boards the plane, the pair part for good. Her complicity in Nazi crimes is made deeper in the film by conflating her character with that of Renate, a “Greiffer” or “grabber” in the novel, used by the Gestapo to identify Jews trying to evade capture. Like
Casablanca
, the film is shot almost entirely on a studio back lot and soundstages and focuses on the underbelly of wartime corruption and exploitation. However, the discordant, somber theme music, the very slow pace of the credits, and the revelation of Lena's collaboration make the final scene less the beginning of a beautiful friendship than clearly the end of one.
The sequence in the sewer, not in the novel, clearly motivates some mise-en-scène, evocative of Carol Reed's
The Third Man
(1949). However, we see Lena and Emil sitting on upturned boxes enjoying a moment of shared food and comradeship, which seems warmer than anything we see in connection with Jake. Unlike Reed's chase of a doomed man through the shadowy tunnels, here there is an unlikely amount of light, especially unmotivated underlighting, throwing up watery shadows across the faces of the estranged couple. Emil complains about the air but it feels more like a romantic hideaway than a sewer.
Any substantial novel converted to a screenplay of 110â20 pages will need to cut some material, but some of the changes that Paul Attanasio's script makes are curious. There are limited exterior shots, with very similar bombed-out buildings being used for both Lena's flat and the area around Jake's billet, so that when Jake spots the boy with a toy boat and realizes that Tully's body could have been dumped elsewhere and floated to Potsdam (a fairly obvious possibility overlooked in both book and film), the precise geography of where this takes place is unclear. In the book, Gunther has a large map of Berlin on his wall, and some similar visual reference points here might well have been useful and would have made the detective element of the narrative easier to follow.
The adaptation builds the role of Tully as Jake's driver and makes Lena much more culpable, which both erode the centrality of Jake as the hero. The opening of the book as Jake's plane arrives in Berlin, the description of the city, and the conversation with a congressman could have been a
succinct introduction to the political maneuvering that the hero is flying into and given a much stronger sense that Jake knows the city (a fact we are later told in the film, rather than feel). In the novel, Lena and Tully never meet. Lena is nursed back to health by a patient and loving Jake, motivating scenes of a romantic and sexual nature, and closes with Emil and a son (Erich), cut from the film, being given safe passage to the United States. In building Tully's part in the film, it diminishes Jake, whose expositional dialogue about his experience of politics, the camps, and Berlin makes his blindness to Tully's duplicity even more ironic.
In the film, it is Tully who is seen first as Lena's former partner (which we see before we even know of any connection with Jake). Tully's virtual pimping of Lena to anyone who will pay partly motivates her shooting him, but the film blackens her character to the extent that she cannot form a close emotional bond with the hero without compromising him morally and dramatically in the eyes of the audience. By showing us more of Tully (a character who is then removed from the narrative), the film feels more seedy, with Jake only a bit-part player rather than the male lead. The film, although generally expressed through Jake's point of view, also includes voice-over comment from Tully (threatening to dominate the opening section where he boasts that “war was the best thing that ever happened to me”) and even later briefly from Lena.
By making Lena cold and distant (several of her scenes have her speaking while facing away from Jake) as well as morally reprehensible, the film prevents the relationship with Jake from developing. In the novel, the sexual scene between Jake and Lena as she takes a bath evokes the bathroom scene in
Out of Sight
but there is no similar chemistry here. Likewise, the link with
Solaris
, of a man having a second chance at love, does not really come alive as their relationship seems stillborn from the outset. When Jake finally meets Lena in the bar, there is limited eye contact (she hears his voice before she sees him), and whereas
Solaris
spends the body of its narrative exploring what a pair of lovers feel about each other, here the meeting is instantly and brutally interrupted by Tully's vicious beating of Jake, and the narrative momentum in the novel provided by the murder is lost by it occurring 25 minutes into the film. The book uses Brandt's father as the repository of the all-important documents, but in the film Lena has them, making her level of knowledge clear (and increasing the cruelty too in reducing the allocation to slave workers from 1,100 calories in the book to 800 in the film).
Jake, like a typical noir detective, is at the mercy of forces beyond his control (as Teitel says at the end, “You've been wrong every step of the
way, why stop now?”). However, it is as if Soderbergh cannot allow his hero to be the complete “patsy” as Tully describes him near the beginning; and in the second half of the film, Jake miraculously discovers the ability to pursue a line of investigation with vigor, even though he misses the biggest clue of all in the shape of Lena. Jake is denied another female sidekick (the photographer, Liz, in the novel) to whom he might show his more emotional side, and although Blanchett can exude glacial charm, it is hard to imagine Lena and Jake in love, in the past or now. Thomas Newman's score, which epitomizes the somber and elegiac mood of postwar construction, reflects this sense of being frozen in emotional aspic, ending fairly much where it began. The oft-repeated line of dialogue “there's always something worse” serves to deny characters much empathy as the viewer is just waiting for the next betrayal.
Rather than the book's focus on revealing the atrocities of the Nazi rocket science program, in the film we have a conspiracy narrative based around the figure of Jake. He only gradually realizes how he has been used to lead the Americans to Emil Brandt, who can then be conveniently eliminated, allowing German scientists to be adopted by American military without the taint of Nazism. The film is quite a bleak view of political expediency with Breimer (Jack Thompson) slapping a newspaper into Jake's hands at the end, underlining the link between the spy games in Berlin and the wider point about ending the war more quickly by using atomic weapons. The difficulty of winning the peace is an interesting subject, but Jake's pseudo-film noir dialogue (talking of “the good old days when you could tell who the bad guy was by who was shooting at you”) seems strangely naïve from one who has reported on the war for several years.
Expositional dialogue, placed in the novel in exchanges with Breimer, is shifted in the film to bizarre exchanges with a helpful barman (Tony Curran), so that Jake pours his heart out about background information and his thoughts and feelings across a bar (including his theories about a murder and secret files), while other customers mill around, to a minor character who has no bearing on the plot other than finding a place to stay for Lena later. In the book, no one really pays Jake any attentionâhe really is a lone investigator. The film plays up his importance, so that on leaving a room at the Potsdam press pool, several key players, including Sikorsky (Ravil Isyanov) Breimer, and Teitel, are all shown turning to watch his exit, implicitly hoping that he will lead them to Brandt. Later, Jake and Lena play out a strange prostitute-and-client scenario with Lena prepared to go through with it but Jake pulling back at the last moment, telling her to keep the money. The generic boundaries of a
wartime film cannot accommodate changes in sexual politics in the intervening years to the present day without a sense of awkward compromises. The film struggles to find a space for a romantic relationship between Jake and Lena, and clearly once she has pulled a gun on him on the stairwell, this becomes even less likely. With a surviving husband, who is ennobled through his repentance and Lena's support of him, to bring Jake and Lena together becomes impossible.
There is also a sense of style being prioritized over plausibility, such as when Jake is allowed to wander by the site of where Tully's body was found. First we have the cliché of miraculously finding a clue at the scene of a crime, then the introduction of some random violence as a guard hits him with a rifle butt, only to then have an expositional chat with Sikorsky while being stitched. The speed with which Jake, having wandered outside the Potsdam conference for a smoke, spots Tully's body, at around two seconds of screen time, does seem ridiculous. Jake and Sikorsky exchange an eye-line match over the body and Jake gives a slight shake of the head, but rather than suggesting an investigator struggling to accept what he is witnessing, this just seems unmotivated and odd. Clooney's reaction on being told that Lena was raped takes Soderbergh's direction about muting demonstrative acting to an absurd extreme, as there is no visible reaction to what must be a major revelation to him. Emil is caught and stabbed by Gunther, whose role is translated from a principled policeman who saves Geismar's life in the novel to a Russian stooge, ridiculously following Bernie and Jake to the records office, like a Marx Brothers routine, especially with his bald head and apparent lack of speech.