In Good, Brazilian director Vicente Amorim’s vague study of an intellectual’s moral capitulation to Germany’s Nazi regime, Viggo Mortensen has a halting voice, sloped shoulders and lank hair that falls across his glasses: he’s trying awfully hard to extinguish the vitality that most cinemagoers expect from him. But this adaptation of C.P. Taylor regularly revived 1981 play isn’t entirely sure what it wants to do with Mortensen’s John Halder once it’s rendered him a nebbish. The Berlin literary professor is a passive man, ready to acquiesce, and the movie reflects the character, ultimately lacking the incisiveness the plot requires.
The story, with the narrative somewhat upended, takes place between 1933 and 1942; between Hitler’s election as a desperate Germany’s Chancellor and the barbaric fury of his dictatorship’s World War II campaign. When first sighted, as a campus book burning interrupts his Proust lecture, Halder is a liberal thinker, opposed to Hitler but certain that common sense and democracy will prevail. He assures his Jewish friend and fellow WWI veteran, Maurice (Jason Isaacs), that in a few months all will be right. It’s a tribute to the industrious empathy that Isaacs brings to the part that Halder’s vapid assurance actually has a weight to it.
The film’s central failing is that as Halder floats with the current, caught up in the ascendancy of Nazism, there’s precious little done to define him. An early suggestion of an official complaint about the censorship of his curriculum is warded off by a stern comment from his department head, and after that he’s silent. In 1937 the Nazi’s, seeking intellectual justification for their plans to euthanise the disabled, seize on Halder’s novel, where a loving husband helps his dying wife commit suicide to end her physical pain, as a supportive tract. Amorim can show Halder’s stammering, huddled fear – standing on steps he’s always looking up at his authoritative host – but he can’t illustrate the internal decay.
Halder joins the Nazi Party, gets promoted, becomes an honorary S.S. officer and ditches his disaffected wife Helen (Anastasia Hille) for the younger Aryan beauty Anne (Jodie Whittaker), but the film persists with portraying him as a decent, if befuddled, creature. 'I can’t bear to hear your rationalisations," declares Maurice, confronting Halder as his own rights are stripped away. But the audience never hears those rationalisations, nor do we get a sense of how his academic work changes. Compare it to Istvan Szabo’s outstanding 1981 movie Mephisto, where Klaus Maria Brandauer’s ambitious actor wills himself to give a performance as a Nazi sympathiser to advance his career.
Good wants you to have sympathy for John Halder, to make you feel his bewilderment at finding himself a Nazi whose work serves their plans. That’s a form of cinematic appeasement. The longer the film goes on the more clueless he becomes about what his role entails. It makes for an unsatisfying, self-serving feature that avoids the heart of the matter.
