Good
Vicente Amorim (2008)
When a bad film is based on a successful stage play it’s not unusual to hear that the fault is entirely in the adaptation and that the original was a masterpiece. Although this is sometimes hard to believe (in the case of The History Boys, for example), that’s not the case with Good, which arrived on cinema screens some twenty-seven years after the first production of C P Taylor’s celebrated play, in October 1981 (just a couple of months before Taylor’s death, at the age of only fifty-two). I’ve not been able to track down a detailed plot synopsis of the play online but it’s in two acts. I guess that the narrative is linear so that the audience gets to know the protagonist, John Halder, as a ‘good’ man – morally thoughtful, politically liberal and dutiful towards his family, including his ailing mother. If the events of Halder’s story are told in chronological order on stage, it’s not hard to see that an audience might be greatly shocked by the metamorphosis of this mild-mannered academic, who also writes fiction, into an influential Nazi. (The impact might be particularly powerful if the change occurs in the interval between the play’s two acts.) The film of Good, with a screenplay by John Wrathall, begins in 1937, when John Halder is summoned to the Reich Chancellery; his interview with an official there ends with questions about why Halder has never joined the Party. The film then cuts back to John’s family life in Frankfurt in 1933, the year in which he also published a novel about a man who kills his wife out of love for her. Viggo Mortensen, who plays John, makes it clear from the opening conversation at the Chancellery that he lacks the strength of purpose to resist Nazi pressure. The obviousness of Mortensen’s characterisation combines with the non-linear structure of the film to ensure that John Halder’s transformation is neither a revelation nor a surprise.
There’s a lot more wrong with Good as a movie than the sequence of events and the weakness of the central performance. Although the early stages suggest that the subject is specifically how a politically naive artist can be corrupted (the Nazi high command likes the idea of adapting John’s euthanasia novel both as a piece of cinema and as larger social policy), the development of this element is pretty sketchy. Most of the dialogue sounds to be post-recorded: as it’s also mostly stagy and/or stiff Good often gives the impression that it’s been dubbed into English. I assume that John’s adultery with one of his students is meant to foreshadow the greater betrayal that he perpetrates in becoming a member of the SS (and to imply – since being unfaithful in a marriage is common – how easily many ‘ordinary’ Germans also signed up to Nazism). But the point is blurred because John’s pianist wife Helen, as played by Anastasia Hille, is inexplicably loopy; you can’t blame him for wanting some relief from her. I assume too that his friendship with Maurice Gluckstein, a Jew who fought in the German army with John in the Great War and is now a successful psychoanalyst, is central to the play. In the film, the role of Maurice shows signs of clumsy abbreviation. (It’s presumably intentional that the names of these German characters are anglicised – to suggest what happens could have happened in Britain too?) Jason Isaacs is forceful and sometimes witty but Maurice switches, in the space of a few lines of dialogue, from a light-hearted caricature (they’re-sex-mad-these-psychoanalysts) to a solemn cliché – a vehemently bitter man whose humour has vanished as completely as his civil rights.
John Wrathall and Vicente Amorim describe John Halder’s regular conscience-stricken outbursts in ways that make them ridiculous. A conversation between him and his eventual boss Adolf Eichmann (Stephen Elder) has the latter asking suspicious questions about John’s continuing friendship with Maurice before Eichmann tells John he’s being given a top job in the Jewish ‘resettlement’ programme. John then asks another bureaucrat for information about Maurice Israel Gluckstein, at which point Eichmann walks off, without seeming to react to this at all. (This is a pattern in the film: the Nazis are meant to be eagle-eyed but never appear to notice John’s demonstrating his divided loyalties very obviously and in unignorable situations.) When John arrives at the concentration camp, he’s focused on finding Maurice, and so is the director: Amorim seems not to realise how offensive it is that the life and death of the Jews in the camp is turned into background to John’s guilty desperation to find his ex-friend. There’s a laughable sequence involving John’s trying to buy Maurice a one-way ticket to Paris (life’s too short to explain how many things are wrong with this bit). Mark Strong has a good, callous urbanity as the official who interviews John at the start but the only major character who’s at all convincing is Jodie Whittaker’s Anne, who seduces John and becomes his second wife. Whittaker manages to suggest, more tellingly and more economically than Mortensen, someone who’s shallow and therefore capable of anything. With Gemma Jones as Halder’s increasingly demented mother and Steven Mackintosh as a keen young SS man who discovers to his horror that he and his equally impeccably Aryan wife can’t breed.
19 October 2012