"Good" starts quietly, but ends powerfully. It goes to the heart of our sense of right and wrong.The movie is set in Germany a few years before WW2. John Halder (Viggo Mortenson) is a WW1 veteran and university lecturer who lives in a small apartment with his wife, two children and a demanding, invalid mother.He has written a novel about euthanasia, which the new Nazi government finds is in accord with their ideas, and John is offered a post within the SS. Although he is anything but a Nazi, John nonetheless enjoys the advantages the position offers him although it compromises his relationship with his friend, Maurice Glückstein (Jason Isaacs), a Jew.John also leaves his wife and marries a sexy young student, Anne (Jodie Whittaker); he is a man who seems easily seduced in love and in life. Eventually, in the film's grim finale, John is forced to confront his lack of firmness and the realities of the Nazi regime.The story shows in microcosm how the Nazis seduced the Germans, and how they accepted the loss of personal freedoms and worse for what seemed to be for the good of the nation, a better life, and maybe, just not to rock the boat. However, there was a price to pay and once ensnared there was no turning back.The film probably has more relevance to people who know some history of the times, because it helps explain why John acts the way he does - although not stated overtly, his actions are driven by underlying fear. There are little touches that the filmmakers don't feel necessary to explain such as why the previous occupants of Anne and John's new apartment have left so suddenly - a knowledge of the times would suggest that they were Jews who had been evicted.Some scenes are painful to watch, especially as John fails to help Maurice as the Nazis ramp up their persecution of the Jews. Here, the film seems to challenge the viewer, "What would you do in his place"? Would you have the courage to swim against the tide of events? John is basically a decent man, however he is too pliable, too apathetic, and does not act until it is too late."Good" may seem slow to some, "Iron Man 2" it is not. But I feel that the time it takes to build its characters pays off in the end - we become involved. One of the most asked questions in history is how did the Nazis manage to sway ordinary Germans to their cause? This film gives part of the answer in an intimate and accessible way. As British philosopher Edmund Burke famously said, " The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing".

One might have thought that the Third Reich is a subject which has been done to death in the cinema, yet occasionally a film turns up which is able to shed new light on the subject. "Good" came out in 2008, the same year as "The Reader", another film about Nazism, but one which was much more widely publicised. John Halder is a young lecturer in the literature department of a German university in the 1930s. (Although the film is set in Germany, the first names of most characters are anglicised- for example John and Maurice rather than Johann and Moritz). When the Nazi Party comes to power in 1933, Halder seems an unlikely convert to their doctrines, as he is relatively liberal in his politics and not at all anti-Semitic- indeed, his closest friend Maurice Glückstein is Jewish. He is angry when he is ordered to stop teaching the works of Jewish authors like Marcel Proust. Yet Halder is seduced into going along with the Party. He first comes to the notice of the Nazi hierarchy when he publishes a novel in support of euthanasia, and is commissioned by them to carry out research into the same subject. He is persuaded that taking out Party membership will advance his career and is given a rank in the SS. This position is at first purely honorary, but later he is charged with more responsibilities. Halder's involvement in the party leads to the end of his friendship with Maurice; when his friend asks him for help in obtaining an exit visa so he can leave Germany, Halder fails to do so out of moral cowardice. The film ends in 1942 with Halder working in a concentration camp. The story is told against the background of Halder's personal life, including his difficult relationship with his elderly mother and the breakdown of his first marriage following an affair with a student, who becomes his second wife. What is striking about Halder's gradual moral corruption is the methods used by the Nazis to get him to co-operate. They never need to resort to threats or bullying. Nobody ever barks "Ve haff vays und means…." or some similar phrase. Even notorious real-life Nazis like Philipp Bouhler and Adolf Eichmann come across as quite reasonable. Halder is won over by flattery, by appeals to his self-interest and by playing on his quite genuine idealism. Although the title "Good" is intended ironically, there must have been many in the early thirties who persuaded themselves that the National Socialist movement could be a force for good, that it could lead to a genuine sense of national rebirth and renewal in Germany and that the its regrettable anti-Semitism was merely a temporary mania which would burn itself out once the Party had consolidated itself in power and established a firmer control over its wild young stormtroopers. When Halder hesitates about joining the Nazi Party he is won over by the arguments of his second wife Anne that the party needs good men like himself as members in order to ensure a better future for the country. I was not very impressed by Viggo Mortensen in the last film I saw him in, "A Perfect Murder", so I am happy to say that he is much better here as Halder, the man whose personal road to Hell is paved with the best of intentions. I also liked Jason Isaacs as Maurice. The theme of the film- a once liberal man seduced by Nazism, was also treated in a German- language film, Istvan Szabo's "Mephisto". I wouldn't rank "Good" quite as highly as Szabo's film, but I certainly preferred it to "The Reader" which I found empty, barren and lacking any new insights into its grim subject-matter. "Good", by contrast, does have something of interest to say about the Nazi era and, by extension, also about the temptation to collaborate with evil which arises whenever people are forced to live under totalitarian regimes. 7/10

I think it must have been a good play. Or perhaps they got the finance from someone who knew how the film would turn out. The acting is good, rather deliberately deadpan for the subject material. Reviews here have to be ten lines of text, although what to do when the film is only worth ten words, some of them rather short and blunt, is not specified.The film is pleading that 'good' Germans who betrayed Jewish friends and helped the Nazis round up Jewish people and send them 'away' just kind of ended up doing the holocaust by a sort of bad luck. Don't tell me that the title is supposed to be ironic.I understand it lost money. Now that is good.

***SPOILERS*** Excellent if a bit talky movie about life in pre WWII Nazi Germany with German Literature professor John Halder, Viggo Mortensen, being swept up with the violence of the Nazi movement in order to improve his position in life and at the same time losing his humanity for his fellow human beings in the process. Called over to the German Chancellory for an interview on his book about euthanasia or mercy killing John is both shocked and impressed to find out that the Fuhrer Adolph Hitler himself was greatly moved by it and wants him to become a high ranking official in the Nazi Party which in fact John isn't a member of.As John is moving up in the world or Nazi Germany his personal life is quickly falling apart. John start's to have an affair with one of his students Anna, Jodie Whittaker, that ends up destroying his marriage. There's also John's best friend psychologist and WWI army buddy Maurice Gluckstein, Jason Isaacs, who just happens to be Jewish. It's John refusing to distance himself from Maurice that causes him all kinds of problems with his Nazi superiors. As for John's mom, Gemma Jones, her losing her mind and becoming suicidal is the reason that he got interested in the subject of mercy killing in the first place! That in order to put her out of her misery, with the help of the German or Nazi Government, before she ends up doing it herself!It's when minor German diplomat Ernst Vom Rath was gunned down by deported, by the Nazis, German Jew Hershel Grynszpan in Paris that John finally came to his senses in what was to become known as the notorious "Kristallnach" or "Night of Broken Glass". That's when in revenge to Vom Rath's murder tens of thousands of German hooligans with the German police looking the other way went on a 24 hour rampage ending up killing some 100 Jews in both Germany & Austria. What was so ironic about all this is that Vom Rath was in fact at the time being investigated by the Nazi Gestapo for his anti Nazi feelings among which was their brutal treatment of the Jews in Germany! ***SPOILERS*** With Maurice arrested and sent, with 30,000 other German Jews, to the nearest concentration camp John was now determined to track him down and , if he's still alive, save his friend's life. That all ends in disaster some four years later when John finds Maurice near death with his mind completely gone as he and hundreds of other concentration camp inmates are being rounded up and sent to their deaths because their no longer any use to the Nazi war effort. Ironically the concentration camp commander in charge of the round up as mass killing was non other then the notorious Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann played by Steven Elder.The film showed how difficult it was for an average German to remained a normal human being in Nazi Germany without being effected with its raciest and political ideology. A situation which even turned a good kind and decent man like John Halder into a robot like following orders from his superiors by the books zombie!