The Painted Veil; The Good Shepherd; The Good German

A Film Freak Central Film Review by Walter Chaw

THE PAINTED VEIL (2006) *** (out of four)	THE GOOD SHEPHERD (2006) ** (out of four)
THE GOOD GERMAN (2006) *1/2 (out of four)

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starring Naomi Watts, Edward Norton, Liev Schreiber, Diana Rigg screenplay by Ron Nyswaner, based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham directed by John Curran	starring Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, Robert De Niro, Alec Baldwin screenplay by Eric Roth directed by Robert De Niro
starring George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Tobey Maguire, Jack Thompson screenplay by Paul Attanasio, based on the novel by Joseph Kanon directed by Steven Soderbergh

Watts in The Painted Veil One of seemingly dozens of pretentious, self-produced vanity pieces from the Edward Norton grist mill, The Painted Veil, John Curran's adaptation of Somerset Maugham's story of colonial malaise, is a pleasant surprise. Naomi Watts and Toby Jones are fabulous (and Norton is steady); it's not terribly paternalistically racist despite being another Western film in which white people exert their magical influence in foreign lands; and even though it's all about prestige and hedonism, it manages now and again to actually be about prestige and hedonism. But like the simultaneously-opening Soderbergh noir The Good German, it's mostly interesting in the meta. What keeps this updating of the old Greta Garbo weeper from being literally better is the lack of immediacy in its tale of emotionally distant scientists and their flapper wives, adrift in the boiler pot of 1920s Shanghai. Not timeless in its remove but instead ineffably dated by it, it's an Old Hollywood production in both epic scale and lack of subtext, making the picture a lovely trifle not unlike other well-done bits of instantly-forgotten prestige (see: Philip Noyce's The Quiet American).

Walter Fane is a bland, emotionally distant research scientist specializing in infectious pathogens. "How fascinating," says socialite and object of Walter's affections, Kitty (Watts). "No, not really," Walter responds, yet Kitty marries Walter, anyway, moving to Shanghai following a whirlwind courtship largely meant to throw her mother's Jane Austen-tatious disapproval back in her face. (A mistake, safe to say.) Kitty finds respite from her subsequent boredom in the arms of diplomat Charlie (Liev Schreiber), an act of adultery the cuckolded Walter avenges by spiriting them away to a cholera outbreak in the middle of the country. Chinese legend Anthony Wong Chau-Sang has a juicy part as a military man who expresses that the troubles of his country are the responsibility of his countrymen and, in what's probably the film's most satisfying scene, demonstrates exactly how culturally specific are the problems that white imperialists like Walter try in vain to solve. Refreshing to say that this version restores Maugham's original ending (mangled in the Garbo), thus allowing for a final shot of the Chinese countryside that encompasses its vastness and beauty along with its essential mystery. In terms of how spoilers bleed, Curran's take has a lot more in common with Scott Smith's well-received penny dreadful The Ruins than with things like Edward Zwick's appalling Blood Diamond or Kevin MacDonald's similarly horrendous The Last King of Scotland. No matter the number of proofs given for silly Kitty's redemption, no matter the number of times it invokes a carpe diem worldview, The Painted Veil works thanks to its pessimistic belief that people can never carve out more than a moment or two of happiness for themselves in the middle of such a beautiful, insensible mess.

Robert De Niro's plodding The Good Shepherd is a different kind of insensible mess. The emotional centre of this semi-fictional account of the founding of the CIA (grounded by a stoic, monotone Matt Damon) hinges on another ill-conceived marriage (to another socialite, played this time by Angelina Jolie) infringed upon by the cloak-and-dagger of the newly-minted Cold War. There's some nice masculine bonding ritualized in the top-secret, homoerotic spanking/pissing/Greco-Roman wrestling of ultra-secret frat Skull & Bones (where Bush Jr. first learned to be a spook) that only occasionally elicits giggles, as well as snatches of interrogation and espionage that make The Good Shepherd a Bletchley Park presentation of a James Bond intrigue, i.e., a spy flick as filtered through the sort of secrecy and emotional reserve required by the profession itself.

Damon's spymaster Wilson is a cipher--made such, the film suggests, by the suicide of his stentorian father, which he witnessed firsthand. We get a boilerplate psychoanalysis of the toll his reticence takes on his life through a parade of treacherous father figures (a gay, Red teacher (Michael Gambon), an FBI man (Alec Baldwin), a military muckety-muck (De Niro)), women wronged (Jolie, a luminous Tammy Blanchard, Martina Gedeck), and finally a boy of his own (Eddie Redmayne in the film's best performance), whose pillow talk might undermine daddy's most important mission. It's the birth of a covert nation allegorized as the dissolution of a traditional family structure; there's no trick in discerning the message of the film as similar to that of Apocalypto (the fall of a great nation facilitated by corruption from within) and, in so doing, figuring out that beyond skewering the cult of masculinity in general and the Skull & Bones in particular lies The Good Shepherd's grand design of indicting the Bush administration's shameful legacy of illegal surveillance and dirty tricks abroad as the culprit behind America's global loss of face. Hardly a lightning bolt, and hardly one that deserves 160 deadening minutes of misdirection and repetition, and hardly anything to justify casting Jolie as the jilted wife of a disinterested husband.

Steven Soderbergh's The Good German is meant as a film set in the 1940s that looks as though it were released in the 1940s, too. Inasmuch as a self-consuming experiment can succeed, it succeeds, though proof of Soderbergh's ability to emulate Guy Maddin proves very little indeed. The Good German is ultimately a slack noir with an oft-beaten anti-hero Geismer (George Clooney), a hissing fatale in the Dietrich mold Lena (Cate Blanchett), and a pseudo-Lorre toad in army driver Tully (Tobey Maguire). It all amounts to not much as Geismer rekindles his wartime flame with turned-out Lena in post-war Berlin while Soderbergh builds a visually-arresting shrine to Weimar filmmakers and expats like Michael Curtiz.

A journalist who's seen more than he should, Geismer wanders around in a wide-eyed gape that skirts on the perilous edge of Clooney's O Brother Where Art Thou? moron performance. He's too smart to be this far behind, and all that's left for us to do during the downtime is contemplate how the picture is really about moral relativity in the post-war, pre-Cold War machinations of the Russians and Americans and their German scientist pawns. It wouldn't pass muster in the company of John Huston, Jacques Tourneur, or Jules Dassin; this is less Out of the Past than it is mired in the meta, its only import located in the furious exculpatory labours of critical admirers and, ironically, the one or two viewers still titillated by ugly words and brief flashes of sex, doggy-style. For as much as Soderbergh's Solaris was a wonderfully intimate update of Tarkovsky's canonical vision, The Good German attests that any act of critical mimic experimentation (Gus Van Sant's Psycho, for instance) requires the same core of human failure and desire, lest it come off as just so much masturbation and self-congratulation.-Walter Chaw

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