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Steven Soderbergh has tried to resurrect the magic of classical Hollywood, principally by sucking out all the air, energy and pleasure from his own filmmaking. Based on the well-regarded Joseph Kanon novel, this film stars a distracted, emotionally detached George Clooney as Jake Geismer, an American journalist who, following World War II, returns to Germany to check out the doings at Potsdam and find his lost love, Lena, a frau who, as played by a vamping Cate Blanchett , recalls Rainer Werner Fassbinder 's postwar heroine Veronika Voss by way of Carol Burnett .
In the name of verisimilitude and creative freedom, his actors talk a blue streak in black-and-white images captured with period-era camera lenses. More lewdly, Tobey Maguire , who plays Tully, one of those smiling sadists of the type once played by Dan Duryea, helps the film earn its R rating by doing the kinds of things to Ms. Blanchett that audiences could only dream of doing to Ingrid Bergman . Here's looking at you kid, flung over the bed and on your knees.
With one startling and critical difference, Paul Attanasio's screenplay follows the general direction of Mr. Kanon's novel, which, embroidered with historical detail, zeroes in on the mid-1940s moment when the United States and the Soviet Union were racing to scoop up German scientists in preparation for the long, cold war to follow.
In this game of high-stakes moral relativism, the Germans clearly have amassed the most chips (six million and counting), though the thuggish Soviets and slick, smiling Americans are doing their best to catch up.
When not chasing after Lena, Jake races around the impressively dilapidated sets trying to put all the geopolitical pieces together. When an American soldier winds up dead in Potsdam, Jake thinks he has the makings of an ideal you-are-there story. His zigzag pursuit of his long-cooled love quickly dovetails with a boiling-hot story involving Nazi war crimes, the details of which are helpfully provided by assorted secondary types, including Beau Bridges as the American military officer running part of Berlin, Leland Orser as an American Jew hunting down Nazis and Ravil Isyanov as a watchful Soviet officer.
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