The Good German works right up till the point that it doesn’t. That point is when Tully, played with vicious aplomb by Tobey Maguire, exits the story. Tully is a welcome character in the story, if only because his presence adds a cynical grounding to the proceedings. Yes, there’s a lot of Old Hollywood on display here, but Tully is a splash of cold water. When he leaves, so does The Good German‘s sense of invention; the rest is rote.

George Clooney plays Jake Geismer, an American journalist in Germany, 1945, on hand to report on the Potsdam Conference. To the public back home, this means the end of war; to those at the Conference, it’s about who gets what spoils of war. The decades-long chess game with the Soviet Union is just around the corner.

Carving up a smaller piece of that pie is Jake’s assigned driver Tully, a U.S. Army grunt in charge of the Berlin motor pool. His introduction to us is that of a bright-eyed, cheery young G.I. just thrilled to do his part. His actions thereafter tell us he is anything but. Coarse, abusive to his girlfriend, endlessly opportunistic, Tully cuts deals with anyone who’ll listen and cheerfully sets Geismer up almost as soon as he meets him. People who think corruption was invented in the 1980’s will call Tully an unwelcome invasion of modern cynicism into a nostalgic film, but to me he’s a clear-eyed look at war profiteering. Petty and cunning though he may be, the only thing that seperates a smalltime crook like Tully from those at the Conference is rank.

Tully wants safe passage to America for his girlfriend Lena (Cate Blanchett), an enigmatic femme fatale whom you’d think would have nothing to do with a guy like that. She’s also Geismer’s old flame, but that’s not all she is; for reasons she keeps to herself, she and her husband are quite valuable both to the Americans and the Soviets. But what would the world’s two major superpowers want with an SS officer and his wife?

When Tully exits, the answer to that question is arrived at through a surprisingly conventional murder mystery with pretensions at making great statements about the cost of war. The ultimate thesis, I suppose, is that people don’t stop being bastards once the peace treaty is signed, and even the most virtuous are forced to compromise to survive at ground zero. “That’s Berlin,” says one character or another with a sardonic half-smile, for what feels like three thousand times throughout the film. This fairly simple lesson is beaten into us so repeatedly that The Good German‘s final revelations about Lena and her husband aren’t even remotely surprising, let alone profound.

I have a feeling this will be a mandatory comment in every review of The Good German, but it’s no less true: if nothing else, this is a beautiful film to behold. It’s one thing to film in black and white, quite another to do so with a knowledge of what black and white can give you. Everyday life is in color, after all; only in the movies can you see life like that. Clooney, Blanchett, and Maguire have faces that receive light and cast shadow in beautiful ways. The ubiquitous presence of cigarettes fills the frame with gorgeously-lit smoke. And every setpiece is a study in fallen grandeur.

But all that cinematic beauty and all those strong performances don’t add up to much when the material is essentially so simple. There’s a better film in here somewhere, one that studies how war transforms people without being quite so obvious about it. But The Good German isn’t it.