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Movie Monday - Good
I thought Good would be an appropriate movie review choice for the US holiday of July 4th. It’s not a perfect movie, probably no movie can be which has a best-selling book or play as its parent, but it’s a well-acted, adequately constructed movie which looks at the effects of Nazism without resorting to the sledge-hammer approach. (Note: I'm saying "adequately constructed" because there were scenes where I felt I needed to know missing back-stories.)
A general complaint first: the director seems unable to take this movie out of its stage setting. He allows a staged, static quality to pervade. Even when John Halder participates in Kristallnacht, the mayhem in the streets fails to capture us.
And then there’s the imaginary metaphoric music that Halder hears in time of stress. I haven’t read nor seen the play but I bet that music comes from there, probably as an identifying mark, like Rosebud in Citizen Kane. But it doesn’t work in the movie. It could work on the stage where the viewing venue even with the best plays always reminds you of your separation of the stage. There is a special power in movies however so that the best of them “join” with us. Unfortunately, the recurring music in the movie, Good, is the most glaring reason as to why I never connected to it.
OK, after damning this movie, let me tell you why I think it’s worthwhile movie to see. Remembering that I have no history with Good (no play knowledge), I watched it as a well-acted morality play. I watched John Halder, the everyman for all good people, get sucked into a vortex of a fascist government like the proverbial frog first placed in the cold water.
I didn't look at Good as yet another Nazi genocide movie, as many do, but rather as a movie which asks the question: When must good people take a stand? And I’m not talking about good people as heroic people, for John Halder is no hero. We meet him as an adequate college lecturer and slightly befuddled husband and son who assumes household duties as his wife spends hours piano playing and his terminally ill mother moans in the background.
The first scene shows him being driven to Nazi headquarters in the early 1930s. A frightened Halder assumes this summons bodes ill for him and then is relieved that Nazi official, Bouhler, (played by Mark Strong, who seems to be replacing Basil Rathbone as the “good to” villain) only wants him to write a position paper on euthanasia since Halder had written about this topic earlier in novel form.
Of course, the audience hears bells and whistles going off at this point since we know how WWII progressed. However, if you can remove that piece of information from your brain and just look at Halder’s situation as it’s happening you will just be seeing any educated citizen, in any country, at any time. The Nazis, at this stage in their power, want Halder for the cover his academic credentials give their policies and Halder is a man so needy in the areas of love and praise. Well, he gets both, and fast. The succubus of Nazism and Anne both appear at the same time and he lets them both in.
The best parts of the movie are the conversations between Halder and Gluckstein. Mortensen and Issacs are good actors and they both play imperfect people very well.
You’ll miss a lot if you view this movie in the context of Nazism. It’s really a movie about all of us, then and now. And that’s why it’s my choice for our July 4th. Celebration of your country’s representative government should not be flag waving events. They should be times of introspection. The Declaration of Independence was only a fledgling step (and a step only for an elite class.) What have we gained, what have we lost in our march to the present? The music is not the metaphor in Good; John Halder is the metaphor and as such, he is the metaphor for all of us.
I thought Good would be an appropriate movie review choice for the US holiday of July 4th. It’s not a perfect movie, probably no movie can be which has a best-selling book or play as its parent, but it’s a well-acted, adequately constructed movie which looks at the effects of Nazism without resorting to the sledge-hammer approach. (Note: I'm saying "adequately constructed" because there were scenes where I felt I needed to know missing back-stories.)
A general complaint first: the director seems unable to take this movie out of its stage setting. He allows a staged, static quality to pervade. Even when John Halder participates in Kristallnacht, the mayhem in the streets fails to capture us.
And then there’s the imaginary metaphoric music that Halder hears in time of stress. I haven’t read nor seen the play but I bet that music comes from there, probably as an identifying mark, like Rosebud in Citizen Kane. But it doesn’t work in the movie. It could work on the stage where the viewing venue even with the best plays always reminds you of your separation of the stage. There is a special power in movies however so that the best of them “join” with us. Unfortunately, the recurring music in the movie, Good, is the most glaring reason as to why I never connected to it.
OK, after damning this movie, let me tell you why I think it’s worthwhile movie to see. Remembering that I have no history with Good (no play knowledge), I watched it as a well-acted morality play. I watched John Halder, the everyman for all good people, get sucked into a vortex of a fascist government like the proverbial frog first placed in the cold water.
I didn't look at Good as yet another Nazi genocide movie, as many do, but rather as a movie which asks the question: When must good people take a stand? And I’m not talking about good people as heroic people, for John Halder is no hero. We meet him as an adequate college lecturer and slightly befuddled husband and son who assumes household duties as his wife spends hours piano playing and his terminally ill mother moans in the background.
The first scene shows him being driven to Nazi headquarters in the early 1930s. A frightened Halder assumes this summons bodes ill for him and then is relieved that Nazi official, Bouhler, (played by Mark Strong, who seems to be replacing Basil Rathbone as the “good to” villain) only wants him to write a position paper on euthanasia since Halder had written about this topic earlier in novel form.
Of course, the audience hears bells and whistles going off at this point since we know how WWII progressed. However, if you can remove that piece of information from your brain and just look at Halder’s situation as it’s happening you will just be seeing any educated citizen, in any country, at any time. The Nazis, at this stage in their power, want Halder for the cover his academic credentials give their policies and Halder is a man so needy in the areas of love and praise. Well, he gets both, and fast. The succubus of Nazism and Anne both appear at the same time and he lets them both in.
The best parts of the movie are the conversations between Halder and Gluckstein. Mortensen and Issacs are good actors and they both play imperfect people very well.
You’ll miss a lot if you view this movie in the context of Nazism. It’s really a movie about all of us, then and now. And that’s why it’s my choice for our July 4th. Celebration of your country’s representative government should not be flag waving events. They should be times of introspection. The Declaration of Independence was only a fledgling step (and a step only for an elite class.) What have we gained, what have we lost in our march to the present? The music is not the metaphor in Good; John Halder is the metaphor and as such, he is the metaphor for all of us.
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