Review: Good (2008)

[Scott Mendelson]

Good
2008
95 minutes
Not Rated

by Scott Mendelson

There is a moment in the middle of Istvan Szabo's Sunshine where John
Neville angrily confronts his Jewish relatives after the Holocaust.
Ralph Fiennes is tearfully recounting how his father was frozen to
death in a concentration camp, when Neville wonders out loud why they
didn't do something. Sure they had guns, but there were tens of
thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Jews and only thousands, if
not hundreds of Nazis. It's a striking moment because it was the first
time I had seen a picture involving the Holocaust that dared to
portray the Jewish victims as anything but hapless victims of an
inexplicable evil. Of courses, in hindsight its easy to ask why more
didn't rise up against the Nazis. Sure, thousands of them would have
been killed in the process, but as long as one of the dead wasn't you,
why not?

I bring up Sunshine because it remains a better, more striking fable
that deals with many of the same issues as Vicente Amorim's Good.
Based on an allegedly classic 1981 play, this small-scale drama
attempts to capture the feelings that many ordinary Germans had as the
Nazi party slowly took complete control of the motherland. It's a
fascinating idea that still resonates: how do you succeed in a corrupt
government without becoming corrupt yourself? And if you do see evil
all around you, do you sacrifice your own comfort to speak out, or do
you just sit back and hope someone else martyrs themselves instead of
you? But the ideas at the heart of the film outweigh the execution of
the film itself.

Some plot - In 1930s Germany, literature professor John Halder (Viggo
Mortensen) sees a sudden rise in good fortune when his novel
advocating euthanasia ends up being used as government propaganda by
high ranking Nazi officials. As his personal stock and potential
fortune rises, Halder finds himself torn between succeeding within a
political party that he does not agree with, or facing the
consequences of shunning the current governmental establishment and
losing any chance for success and financial security.

Again, this is an idea that is always worth exploring, the struggle of
(to quote a recent high-profile tent-poler) 'trying to be decent men,
in an indecent time'. But the fatal flaw of the story is that our
protagonist isn't just decent, he's also gloriously naive. Time and
time again, he tries to reason with his Jewish friend, Maurice (Jason
Issacs), claiming that Hitler's reign is just a fad and that things
will blow over soon enough. This may have been a reasonable position
for an educated man to have in the mid 1930s, but John clings to this
belief well past the point of self-delusion.

If this were a story about self-blindness, about a life lived without
peripheral vision, then that would be one thing. But John Halder is
presented to us as an educated and mentally sound man, someone who
genuinely believes that the Third Reich is just a political party that
will eventually be voted out of office. It is difficult to tell a
story about a morally sound man who struggles with his humanity in a
totalitarian regime when, for the majority of the movie, said hero is
completely oblivious to the actual actions and true intentions of said
regime.

Story flaws aside, the film looks splendid, and the acting is fine.
Mortensen does righteous anguish as well as anyone, and Jason Isaacs
provides a solid counterpoint, both as a foil and a direct consequence
of Holder's bad judgment. The scenes between the Isaac and Mortensen
are easily the film's highlights. And the picture ends on a jaw
dropping five-minute shot that renders the fantastically terrible as
plausible and frighteningly mundane.

Good is an interesting idea, thoughtfully acted and visually
intriguing. However, it is nearly undone by a lead character that
fails to represent the general idea that the film is allegedly about.
Maybe it worked better as a play, but this theatrical adaptation only
barely succeeds as a template for after-film conversation, rather than
as an entertainment in and of itself.

Grade: C+