Product Details

• Actors: Viggo Mortensen, Jason Isaacs, Jodie Whittaker, Steven Mackintosh, Mark Strong
• Directors: Vicente Amorim
• Writers: C.P. Taylor, John Wrathall
• Producers: B.J. Rack, Billy Dietrich, Brian O'Shea, Dan Lupovitz, Danielle Dajani
• Format: Widescreen
• Language: English
• Subtitles: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: Unrated
• Studio: National Entertainment Media
• DVD Release Date: September 28, 2010
• Run Time: 96 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B003RHZ6ES
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #79,018 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Good [Blu-ray]" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

When John Halder’s (Viggo Mortensen) latest novel is enlisted by powerful political figures in the Nazi party to push their agenda, his career and social standing instantly advance. But after learning of the Reich’s horrific plans for the future and the devastating effects they will have on people close to him, John must decide whether or not to take a stand and risk losing everything.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "It's real.", September 19, 2010

By 

J. H. Minde "Everything I need is right here" (Boca Raton, Florida and Brooklyn, New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Good (DVD)

Viggo Mortensen is a chief exponent of the Block-of-Wood School of Acting, but he is perfectly cast as Professor "Johnnie" Halder, a Professor of Literature and novelist in Hitler's Germany.

As GOOD opens, Johnnie is just like anybody else. He is dealing with a neurotic wife and demanding children, balancing home and work, and is dedicating time to caring for his increasingly frail and senile mother. Hitler has just come to power. He begins an affair with his student, Anne Hartman, more as a distraction than anything else, and maintains his friendship with Maurice Gluckstein, his former psychoanalyst. He decries Nazi book-burnings and dismisses the Fuhrer as a "joke."

In an attempt to establish its credibility, the new government is seeking out experts to endorse its policies, and they trip across Johnnie's sensitively written 1920s novel of a husband who aids his terminally ill wife in an assisted suicide.

Although Johnnie despises Naziism he is flattered by the attention paid to his novel, and accepts (with misgivings) an honorary commission in the SS. This opens the door to promotions at the University. He becomes Dean of Literature after the former Dean, Herr Mandelbaum "leaves in such a hurry." He is tapped to inspect facilities for the care of the mentally ill, based on his "humanitarian" writings.

Despite pressure, he continues to befriend Maurice, who is becoming more and more bleak as time passes. He does attempt to arrange for his friend to leave Germany, but he is stopped from purchasing a ticket to Paris. Finally, he loses track of his friend in 1938, right after Kristallnacht.

Throughout GOOD, Johnnie IS "good," but he becomes increasingly blind to what is happening around him as he travels down the slippery slope that eventually takes him to Auschwitz on an inspecton tour.

Never evil, Johnnie Halder is an Everyman who goes along, accepts what he told without question, and is increasingly co-opted by flattery and comfort. In the end, he comes to realize that he is stumbling through a waking nightmare of which he in part created. Not judgmental of its protagonist, GOOD invites us to question just what a "good" man is and does and where the bounds of responsibility lie.

26 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Human Comedy: A Study of Adaptation, September 6, 2010

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Good (DVD)

A new movement for change, promising a life richer in education, physical prowess, diminished crime, and increased wealth is like a magnet, and the promises that National Socialist Republic created in all forms of the media in the 1930s were probably heady enough that the post World War I Germans could turn a blind eye to the vacuous reality of a rising maniac's promises. GOOD is a film that suggests how the good common people responded to the rise of the Third Reich - the Nazi party with its loathsome guardianship in the Gestapo. It suggests how personal needs could cloud the mind to see only the benefits of a new order that would eventually destroy millions of people and attempt to transform the world in a new social order. And it is painful to watch the disease progress into every aspect of life in Germany.

John Halder (Viggo Mortensen) is a professor of literature and a writer of novels: his latest novel is a fictional story about a man who, out of love for his suffering wife, assists her dying. This novel catches the eye of Hitler and the Reichminister Bouhler (Mark Strong) who encourages Halder to draft a paper describing how euthanasia is a good and righteous act - a paper that will eventually 'justify' the massacre of Jews and other 'undesirables'. Halder's life is in such upheaval (his mother (Gemma Jones) is dying of tuberculosis while living with Halder and his piano obsessed wife Helen (Anastasia Hille) whom he divorces, Halder finds happiness only with a student Anne (Jodie Whittaker) who is fascinated with the Nazi party, and Halder's only close friend is psychiatrist Maurice Israel Glückstein (Jason Issacs) who is Jewish and loathes the Nazi party. Because of Halder's needs in life and also because of the glory he feels being praised for his novel, he agrees to be an 'advisor' to the party. His confrères include Adolph Eichmann (Steven Elder) and Josef Goebbels (Adrian Schiller) and slowly the good man John Halder becomes immersed in the Nazi party.

Maurice, being Jewish and detesting John's alliance with the Nazis, must escape Germany as the Jewish purge begins. His only hope is aid from Halder's Nazi affiliation and he desperately seeks Halder's help. Halder is unable to come to Maurice's aid; Maurice is evacuated and Halder's inspection of the concentration camps makes him face his worse fear about his selling out his morals and honor and his losing his closest friend.

GOOD began as a play by C.P. Taylor and was transformed into a screenplay by John Wrathall. Vicente Amorim directs a cast of mixed experience, but from Mortensen and Isaacs and Jones he draws fine performances. Throughout the film Halder has aural delusions: at times of stress he hears music, a factor that in retrospect makes us question his own stability. The music he hears is a sad rewriting of the works of Gustav Mahler -' Die Zwei Blauen Augen von meinem Schatz', and 'O Mensch!' from the Mahler 3rd Symphony (both sung in English translations by people on the street!), bit and pieces of score quoting phrases from Mahler in a very pedestrian arrangement, and finally orchestral recordings of moments from Mahler's Symphonies No.1 and No.3. The pedestrian quality of the score weights the film down. The cinematography by Andrew Dunn is fine (the film was shot in Hungary). Overall, it feels like this is a strong idea of a statement of what happens to the minds common men in times of crises. For this viewer it simply doesn't accomplish its goal, despite the worthy attempt Viggo Mortensen makes. Grady Harp, September 10

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Viggo is great in "Good", November 12, 2011

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Suzanne Brannon (Colorado) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Good (DVD)

Another view of how Nazi Germany came to be. Average people just trying to survive what they don't fully understand.