If you see one Nazi movie, make it ‘Good’

Drama covers familiar ground but still packs a wallop

Viggo Mortensen leaves his wife for the pretty Jodie Whittaker in "Good."

Jean-Luc Godard once said that the best way to review a movie is to make another movie; sometimes, all it takes is seeing a second movie about a certain subject matter to highlight everything that the first movie did wrong. Such is the case with “Good,” which deals with an intellectual who gets swept up into the Nazi party without ever thinking about the larger issues at stake; it’s a powerful film on its own merits, but it also points out how tame and impotent “The Reader” is in examining similar issues.

“Good” stars Viggo Mortensen as John Halder, a Berlin literature professor whose novel about compassionate euthanasia finds favor among high-ranking Nazi officials, including Hitler, in 1937. While John has never joined the party, and doesn’t exactly subscribe to their politics, he’s won over by their flattery, never bothering to consider the sinister implications behind their interest in the subject. And when it’s made clear to him that party membership is required to climb the ranks at his university, he has no compunctions about doing so.

John Wrathall’s screenplay, based on the play by C.P. Taylor, shows how one rationalization flows into the next for John, who sheds his wife (Anastasia Hille) for a young, pretty student (Jodie Whittaker) and even becomes a high-ranking officer in the SS, although John insists it’s merely an “honorary” title.