"Good."

By David Hudson on 01/02/2009

"In 'Good,' the anemic screen adaptation of CP Taylor's play about a respectable 'good German' who passively acquiesces to Hitler's agenda, Viggo Mortensen, miscast and ineptly directed by Vicente Amorim, plays John Halder, a liberal, mild-mannered literature professor who becomes a Nazi," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times.

"Morally speaking, everything about 'Good' is tidily correct," writes Richard Schickel for Time. "But it is more a predictable parable than a full-fledged narrative."

"It's literally and dramatically bloodless," finds Bill Weber in Slant. "[T]he problematic scenario, with its inscrutable musical reveries of laborers, bureaucrats, and death-camp inmates breaking into Mahler songs, is the key deficiency; despite the title, Halder never seems to possess or aspire to any standard of conscious virtue."

Updated through 1/5.

"The soul of Germany under Nazism is always worth examining, but not much good will come from Good, which takes on the potentially interesting question of passive collusion with Nazism, but is so incompetently mounted by Brazilian director Vicente Amorim (it takes a clumsy directorial hand to make Viggo Mortensen come on like 'Sesame Street's Mr Noodle) as to be utterly incoherent." Ella Taylor in the Voice: "At the end, the stunned professor totters around a remarkably cleaned-up concentration camp, seeing the light at last. I mean, who knew?"

Nick Schager finds that "'Good' - directed with passable, somewhat stagey formality by Amorim - definitively establishes its argument so early on that, aside from its final revelation regarding Halder's sporadic hallucinations, it only mildly stirs the head or heart."

"The problem with exploring this particular time and place in fiction is that in some ways the material's too juicy to handle without leaving a splattery, unsubtle mess," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "Certainly 'Good' doesn't go in for a lot of nuance. It's an old-fashioned hoke-fest."

"To those who wonder if we really need Hollywood to give us more Holocaust stories, I would argue yes, just better ones than we get with 'Good,'" writes Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times.

For IFC, Aaron Hillis "sat down with Mortensen before the holidays to gab about the film, traveling and contemporary politics - about which he has wonderfully fervent opinions."

Michael Ordoña talks with Jason Isaacs for the LAT.

IndieWIRE interviews Amorim.

Update: Writing for MSNBC, Alonso Duralde finds "Good" to be "a powerful film on its own merits, but it also points out how tame and impotent 'The Reader' is in examining similar issues."

Update, 1/5: "Sympathy for the devil is a common theme in the recent crop of Nazi and Holocaust films, with Kate Winslet and Tom Cruise both imbuing varying degrees of good will in their goose-stepping characters," writes Leo Goldsmith for indieWIRE. "[T]he sum of ['Good's] parts amounts to a lesson in complacency and self-interest that's apparent from the start."

[Photo: "Good," Good Films, 2008]

Tags: Viggo Mortensen, Vincente Amorim