Like The Third Man, German takes place in Berlin immediately following World War II, when the city is full of bombed-out ruins and divided into quadrants controlled by the Americans, the Russians, the British and the French. Into the city comes military journalist Jake Geismer (Clooney), ostensibly to cover the Potsdam Conference, although Jake never seems to get around to any actual reporting.
Instead, he finds himself faced with Lena Brandt (Blanchett), with whom he had an affair when he lived in Berlin before the war, and for whom he obviously still carries a torch. Lena's mixed up with Tully (Maguire), a superficially all-American young soldier who's assigned to Jake as his driver and guide. Mocking the square, patriotic military characters that often showed up in American war films, Maguire's Tully goes on about mom and apple pie with Jake, only to spend his nights getting drunk, making shady deals with the Russians and screwing anything that moves.
As in any good noir, there's a dead body, a shadowy conspiracy and a convoluted plot that quickly engulfs our hero—it's great entertainment for anyone who loves those old films. But Soderbergh isn't just paying tribute to a bygone formula, or reveling in the opportunity to contrast explicit language and sexuality with his rigid, old-fashioned style. Under its layers of hard-boiled dialogue and sometimes mannered performances, German has something genuine to say about the noirish moral ambiguity that infused postwar politics, showing the aftermath of the "good war" as a time of amoral opportunism on all sides.