rated R 

I’m not sure who to be angrier with, a generally responsible director like Steven Soderbergh (“Traffic”) for masturbating in public like this, or his friend George Clooney for encouraging him.

Soderbergh has generated enough awards (and enough cold hard cash for Hollywood proper) that he’s one of the lucky few artists who’s allowed to run off-leash between blockbusters to produce his own smaller projects with his pals. This kind of liberty is exciting, but it’s not without risks. His personal projects have become increasingly derivative. His “Ocean’s 11” was wrapped in swanky 1950s Vegas Rat Pack neon. “Ocean’s 12,” set primarily in Europe, took its visual cues from the gritty street-born Italian thrillers of the 1970s. While his exploration of various cinematic styles is intriguing to a degree, it also feels like being led through a lesson plan still in progress.

The storyline of “The Good German,” Soderbergh’s latest, bears a notable resemblance to Lars von Trier’s “Zentropa” (1992): an American travels to Germany in the aftermath of WWII and quickly finds himself screwed from all sides by crime, guilt, suspicion, politics, romance and, yes, murder. Von Trier’s movie was also filmed in black and white (mostly), his technical conceit of choice a ruthless employment of disconnected green screen backgrounds. The work stands today as a youthful, energetic exercise in visual and thematic irony.

Soderbergh’s model features instead an unswerving dedication to using only technology that would have been available in 1945. The lights, the camera, the film stock, the whole nine yards. The establishing and transitional exterior shots are all from blown out, shaky, 60-year-old stock footage of the war-ravaged streets of Berlin. “As it was then, so let it be now” would seem the rule. Camera angles, patterns of dialogue, the use of light and shadow and cigarettes. The result is actually kind of fascinating, but in a bloodless, detached, uncomfortably academic way. This feels far less like going to a movie than it does like going to a movie museum.

Of course, with any 1940s would-be wannabe post-war-noir, it’s understood that deadpan dialogue is part of the package (see the Coens’ “The Man Who Wasn’t There” or even Steve Martin’s “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid”). However, the exchanges between Clooney as uniformed hero Capt. Jake Geismer and Cate Blanchette as his mysteriously entangled ex, which should crackle and seethe and scorch the very silver from the screen, are utterly, unfortunately and eventually excruciatingly lifeless. Her attempt at a Marlene Dietrich impression is costume quality at best and entirely transparent. One could imagine Clooney’s lines, if read with some grapes and a little “Dragnet” staccato, might actually pass as Bogart-esque, but Ol’ George just plods along through it and comes off about as sharp as a bag of sand. Toby McGuire’s got some energy as Geismer’s weasely two-faced driver, though. In a role that might have previously engaged a young Peter Lorre, I couldn’t think of a slimier, or more believable, evil little pip-squeak.

After watching Steven Soderbergh play with his equipment for an hour and a half, I’m left wondering whether this movie really made to entertain anybody but Steven Soderbergh. Don’t get me wrong, he’s put considerable resources behind plenty of great smaller indie productions that would probably never have seen pre-production if not for his creative and financial involvement. He’s surrounded himself with some of the industry’s most adventurous, talented and culturally aware people. So how, I ask, in all this complicity, could there not have been one voice to pipe up and say, “Steven, please put that thing away”? We’re all glad you had fun, but now that you’re done, would you please zip up and get back to work?