Berlin. 1945. The war against Germany is over and U.S. war correspondent Jake Geismer (George Clooney, looking great but horribly miscast) has just arrived to cover the Potsdam Peace Conference. It is her the Allied leaders will meet determine the fate of their vanquished aggressor, the United States and Russia seeing what spoils they can carve from the country’s carcass and take back home for themselves.

This is a return to Berlin for Jake, a homecoming he’s not altogether happy about. It was here that he fell in love; lost his heart to a girl he would do just about anything for. But that was before the way, before the journalist became a cynic willing to shrug off the once-beautiful city’s massive devastation with an indifferent sigh.

Still, Jake can’t help but be shocked when he discovers his beloved Lena (Cate Blanchett, doing a pitch-purrrfect Marlene Dietrich impression) taking up with his disgusting reptile of a driver Corporal Tully (a suitably despicable and toxic Tobey Maguire). The kid is despicable, a minor league Harry Lime willing to trade anything and everything, people included, on the Black Market. Lena deserves better, and it sickens Jake to realize the ravages of war have driven the woman who once filled his dreams into such an odious man’s oily arms.

This is “The Good German” (not to be confused with “The Good Shepherd,” also opening today), Steven Soderbergh’s (“Traffic”) peon to 1940’s war-torn noir thrillers of the past like “Casablanca” and “The Third Man.” Filled with murder, decent, sex, gunfire and international intrigue, the film is a glorious attempt to revisit a style and a genre once a Hollywood staple, the director and his cast crafting an adventure in the same way Michael Curtiz or Carol Reed would have fashioned half a century ago.

So why does the whole thing feel like an amazingly beautiful and sometimes brilliantly realized lost cause? Maybe because, for all the technical bravado and beauteous black and white camerawork, the picture as a whole is a poorly scripted herky-jerky mess that’s for too distancing and unengaging to ever be considered a success. It’s a weirdly fascinating curiosity, and while the film is certainly not difficult to watch caring about a thing that’s going on within it most definitely is.

The main issue here has to do with the picture’s structure. There is no through line here, no one point of view to carry a viewer from start to finish. Instead of trying to follow the story’s rube Geismer as he tries to unravel the mystery and save the seductive woman who proves to be incapable of telling the truth, acclaimed screenwriter Paul Attanasio (“Donnie Brasco”) has split the narrative into thirds diluted the scintillatingly absorbing whodunit found in novelist Joseph Kanon fascinating book.

Still, the highs here, while not outnumbering the lows, are certainly fun to talk about and revel in. Soderbergh shoots the film with lusty enthusiasm, the screen filled with eye-popping images seeped in blacks, whites and the luxurious grays hiding in-between. Composer Thomas Newman’s (“Little Children,” son of the late Alfred Newman) score is electrically boisterous, while Philip Messina’s (“Solaris”) fantastic production design is a perfect recreation of how a filmmaker like Curtiz or Billy Wilder would have re-imagined a shattered Berlin on a Hollywood backlot.

I just wish I would have cared about the people walking around in this world as much as I marveled at the spectacle assembled to put them there. “The Good German” is a case of style overwhelming the substance, the picture’s heart and soul left forgotten somewhere on a dusty cutting room floor.

Film Rating: ××1/2  (out of 4)