Reviewed by GREG KING
Director: Vicente Amorim
Stars: Viggo Mortensen, Jason Isaacs, Jodie Whittaker, Mark Strong, Stephen Mackintosh, Gemma Jones.

Set in Berlin under the Nazis in the late 1930’s, Good is yet another Holocaust-themed drama which tries to explore what happened and why people allowed it to happen.
John Halder (Viggo Mortensen) is an author and college professor whose novel on the theme of euthanasia to ease the suffering of loved ones attracts the attention of the Nazi hierarchy. Hitler and his cronies seize upon Halder’s book and his ideas to somehow justify their policy of exterminating inferior races. They hire Halder to write a propaganda paper justifying euthanasia, which eventually becomes a cornerstone of their policy of genocide. Courted by the Nazis, Halder is persuaded to reluctantly join the Nazi party, much to the shock and disappointment of his best friend Maurice (Jason Isaacs, who is also one of the film’s executive producers), a psychiatrist of Jewish background. Halder naively believes the Nazi’s promises that he will be able to help shape the future of his country by working within the Party structure, who want intellectuals to give their policies the faint hint of credibility and credence.
Halder is too distracted by his own personal problems – a terminally sick mother, an affair with one of his students, and a wife too busy with her own interests – to really notice what is happening around him. When Maurice asks Halder for his help to leave the country before he is arrested and forcibly relocated, John is reluctant to become involved. When his conscience is eventually awakened it is too late.
The film is adapted from a play by British playwright C P Taylor. Brazilian director Vicente Amorim (The Middle Of The World, etc) opens up the drama quite effectively for the screen. It’s a moderately successful film that often veers into awkward melodrama. Good unfolds at a deliberately measured, slow pace, which makes the final scenes set against the confusion and chaos of a concentration camp that much more effective.
However, for the most part this a film that lacks both a clear focus, and the emotional pull and suppressed anger of recent similarly themed films like the superior The Reader and The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, etc. The film’s biggest problem lies in the casting of Mortensen in the central role. Given his strong physical presence in films like The Lord Of The Rings trilogy and the recent Eastern Promises, he seems miscast in a more introverted and restrained role as the mild mannered and uncertain academic who is ultimately forced to choose between friendship and survival in a dangerous time.
Good has been shot on locations in Hungary, which convincingly doubles for 1930’s Berlin.
**