The Third Draft

The Lives of Others (2006)                        Back to Reviews
(Das Leben der Anderen)
by Coach Patton
©D. Patton, All Rights Reserved

Writer/Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
 
Awards: 2007 Oscar Best Foreign Film. Another 32 wins & 10 nominations

Running Length: 2:17 Rated: R (Nudity, sexual situations)

Plot Summary: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's movie debut focuses on the horrifying, sometimes unintentionally funny system of observation in the former East Germany. Movies about spies are by necessity clammy, covert affairs, and The Lives of Others is no exception. Set in East Germany in 1984, five years before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, it's about the machinations of the Stasi, the East German secret police that employed 100,000 and had twice that number acting as informants.
 
Troupe: Ulrich Mühe, Martina Gedeck, Sebastian Koch, Ulrich Turkur, Thomas Thieme
 
Political correctness in the so-called German Democratic Republic (1950-1990) wasn't a matter of social disapproval but of survival or death. The Lives of Others, surprise winner of this year's Oscar for best foreign language film, is both a chilling political thriller and a powerful human drama about free-thinking people doing the right and wrong things in the worst of Voltaire's possible worlds.

Since reunification, East Germans would understandably prefer to forget about the secret police, or "Stasi," who controlled and terrorized their lives. But writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck won't let them. At the center of his story is cold, emotionless Capt. Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe), a diabolical Picasso of the art of surveillance and interrogation, assigned to spy on celebrated playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his actress girlfriend Christa-Maria (Martina Gedeck).

Never mind that Dreyman -- a Bertolt Brecht kind of leftist -- is considered the regime's "only non-subversive writer." He is suspected of disloyalty on the "hunch" of Stasi officials with career ambitions and other axes to grind. Wiesler is told to bug the writer's apartment and gather evidence against him and other "dangerous" intellectuals in his circle.

Talk about the banality of evil: At its peak, Erich Honecker's East German police state employed some 90,000 "state security" agents (plus hundreds of thousands of informants) to monitor the lives and activities of a staggering one-third of its 17 million citizens -- all potential "enemies of socialism."

The more Wiesler eavesdrops, the more caught up in his suspects' lives and loves he becomes -- and the more he learns about one of his superiors' conflict-of-interest in Christa-Maria.

From the opening pre-credits sequence in which a prisoner is broken down with sleep deprivation, director von Donnersmarck evokes the soul-crushing fear and oppressive dreariness of life -- the bleak offices, apartment buildings and thought-processes -- under a regime whose secret police act like the boring civil servants they are, which makes them all the more inhuman and terrifying. It's a world in which even a harmless joke can bring about your arrest.

The Lives of Others owes some conceptual debt to Francis Ford Coppola's great film The Conversation (1974), in which surveillance ace Gene Hackman's obsessive personal involvement leads to an overdue crisis of conscience and responsibility. At two hours and 17 minutes, Lives is demanding but also riveting. The plot and the superbly nuanced performances of Muhe and Koch come in shades of gray -- not black and white, like this year's best film Oscar-winner, The Departed (2006).

(Don't misunderstand me. I'm a big Martin Scorsese fan. I can think of at least five of his films that coulda/shoulda won Oscars for best screenplay and film -- Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York -- but the convoluted, far-fetched Departed isn't one of them.)

The good and bad fellas in Lives of Others -- as in real life -- aren't so easy to tell apart. In one of its most thought-provoking psycho-artistic moments, someone quotes Lenin's remark about Beethoven's "Appassionata" Sonata: "If I keep listening to it, I won't finish the revolution."

So true, tragic, and perfect. In the Lest-We-Forget-Dept.: Ronald Reagan's responsibility for the Fall of the Wall or "winning" the Cold War is a ridiculous American myth. If there was one heroic figure metaphorically listening to the "Appassionata," it was Mikhail Gorbachev, not Reagan. But there wasn't one hero. There were nameless millions of them -- East Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs -- on their, not our, side of the Iron Curtain.

The Lives of Others is a grimly revelatory experience, making clear that the Communist police state collapsed of its own internal dry rot -- a house of cards blown down, rather than blown up, by the non-ideological breath and resistance of others.

It's no secret that some of the most powerful dramas are those that depict character transformations. Such is the case with The Lives of Others, the stirring and affecting feature debut of German filmmaker Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. With a deft hand, von Donnersmarck engages us in the life of a cold, dispassionate character then takes us on a journey that transforms him from detached observer to involved partisan.

This is one of the most focused movies I can recall seeing, very linear in its progress, not a wasted scene or moment. There is a rule in screenwriting and novels – tell your story and when you finish: get out, don’t lollygag around and keep writing. Writer/director von Donnersmarck tells his story and gets out as if he had created the rule – it has the finest ending of any movie I can remember seeing.

The film is careful to avoid overt melodrama but, at the same time, it engages the emotions. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the movie is the complexity and intelligence evident in the screenplay, which offers multiple valid interpretations for certain actions but never insults the audience by insisting upon one. The winner of the 2007 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and major player in European and Film Festival awards, The Lives of Others is deserving of the accolades it has acquired. Or at least that’s How It Seemed from Where I Sat.
 

What’s it worth?
For film buffs AND For the average viewer -- the price of the evening show. This is a must see film! If you cannot see it in a theater, write down the name so you’ll watch for it when it comes out in DVD.

ROLL CREDITS
 
Writer/Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Cinematography: Hagen Bogdanski
Music: Gabriel Yared
CAST
Martina Gedeck --- Christa-Maria Sieland
Ulrich Mühe --- Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler
Sebastian Koch --- Georg Dreyman
Ulrich Tukur --- Oberstleutnant Anton Grubitz
Thomas Thieme --- Minister Bruno Hempf
Hans-Uwe Bauer --- Paul Hauser
Volkmar Kleinert --- Albert Jerska
Matthias Brenner --- Karl Wallner
Charly Hübner --- Udo
Herbert Knaup --- Gregor Hessenstein

 
FADE TO BLACK
In The Name Of Truth, Justice and In the Service of A Higher Good, I Remain Your Friend, Movie Reviewer and Spiritual Advisor, Coach Patton

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