DRAMA; 1hr 32min
STARRING: Viggo Mortensen, Jason Isaacs, Jodie Whittaker
Welcome to the party: Mortensen and Whittaker
German literature professor John Halder (Mortensen) is a fundamentally decent but non-assertive man. This leaves him at the mercy of circumstances when, in 1937, senior Nazi officials take a shine to a novel he wrote years before and commission him to draft a paper on the positives of euthanasia.
In the pay of a party he has always despised, remarried to a glamorous young devotee (Whittaker as Anne), Halder has an oily sheen of success. But its rotten ethical foundations are reflected by his growing distance from his imperilled Jewish best friend, Maurice (Isaacs).
Based on C.P. Taylor’s 1982 stage play and directed with a cool, cerebral, fireworks-free sensibility by Vincente Amorim, Good makes no blanket dramatic statements as it needles into the seductive psyche of corruption. But Mortensen’s pained confusion is no less convincing for that.
