‘The Lives of Others’

Engrossing and moving, this film is a history lesson of the best kind that focuses on how official policies affect ordinary citizens.

By: Elise Nakhnikian
   The Oscars aren’t a reliable gauge of anything — except maybe what’s hot in high-end formal wear — but this year’s unusually rich crop of nominees reflected a significant trend in movie distribution: Every year, it seems, more high-quality films from other nations are released in the U.S. And every year, it seems, they’re seen by fewer people.
   Take The Lives of Others. Guillermo del Toro’s brilliant Pan’s Labyrinth was the exception that proves the rule about foreign films this year, scoring not just with critics but with audiences. (It earned about $30 million in its first six weeks in the U.S., a fortune for a subtitled, surrealistic art-house fable that is, let’s face it, a bit of a bummer.) So Hollywood insiders were shocked when The Lives of Others, a quiet little film about East Germany’s dreaded secret police that few Americans had seen, won this year’s Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar.
   Picking a winner in a category that included not only Pan’s Labyrinth but also the equally excellent Days of Glory can’t have been easy, but the vote was no mistake. The Lives of Others is a history lesson of the best kind. Engrossing and moving, it focuses not on the nitty-gritty of official policymaking but on how official policies affect ordinary citizens.
   Or not-so-ordinary citizens. The Lives of Others is about Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), a popular playwright, and Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe), the Stasi captain assigned to monitor him for evidence of subversive activity. The Stasi, as writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck points out in the movie’s production notes, were particularly obsessed with artists, whose unpredictable behavior and inclination toward independent thinking made them perpetually suspect.
   Wiesler, a true believer in the cause, is rigid with a sense of his own righteousness when he wires Dreyman’s apartment and sets up a 24-hour listening post nearby. Monitoring every word and action, right down to how often Dreyman and his girlfriend, the actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Mostly Martha’s Martina Gedeck), make love, he’s sure he’ll find some evidence of subversive activity.
   There’s considerable suspense in waiting to see if whether Wiesler’s trap will snap shut its powerful jaws on Dreyman, who proves to be an honorable man, but the real surprise is that the movie proves to be more Wiesler’s story than it is Dreyman’s. That shift in emphasis happens almost imperceptibly, as subtle and thoughtful as everything else in this intelligent script.
   As we switch back and forth between Dreyman’s emotionally rich life and Wiesler’s lonely vigil, von Donnersmarck and Muhe gradually enlist our sympathy for this duty-bound little man, whose sterile life consists almost entirely of eavesdropping on the lives of others. And just as we’re drawn to Wiesler against our will, he finds himself empathizing with his subject. Meanwhile, he learns things that make him question the basis of the investigation, and the cat and mouse story grows more complicated.
   Muhe, who could be Ben Kingsley’s blue-eyed brother, plays a whole set of variations on Wiesler’s stone face without ever bending his thin lips into so much as a hint of a smile. His body is equally eloquent, its taut stillness and unfailingly erect posture broadcasting Wiesler’s confidence and conviction early on, then folding into itself like a balloon with the air let out.
   Von Donnersmarck grew up in West Berlin but his parents came from the East, so he spent time in East Germany as a boy on family trips. He made his film in part to bear witness to the terror of that era, which is already being sentimentalized in Germany by the phenomenon known as "ostalgie," a rose-colored nostalgia for the East that blurs out the surveillance, imprisonments and killings the "dictatorship of the proletariat" used to keep its citizens in line. Between Stasi employees and informers, says von Donnersmarck, "Approximately one in 50 citizens served the Stasi in some capacity, one of the highest penetrations of a society by any intelligence gathering organization."
   Many of the film’s actors and crew are former East Germans who were under surveillance before the Wall came down. Muhe learned later that four members of his theater group were spying on him — and that his wife of six years, a famous actress, was a Stasi informer. "When people ask him how he prepared for the role, Ulrich Muhe anwers: ‘I remembered,’" says von Donnersmarck. Another former victim was the propmaster, who was imprisoned for two years by the Stasi. To ensure the authenticity of the film, he insisted on using real Stasi surveillance equipment and other artifacts rather than making facsimiles. Using "the actual tools of martyrdom," says von Donnersmarck, contributed to "the very intense atmosphere on the set."
   That sense of reality and urgency also speaks to Americans — at least, to the relatively few who manage to see this movie. At a time when our government is justifying domestic wiretapping when dealing with "enemies of the state," The Lives of Others comes to us like an urgent telegram from the past.
Rated R for some sexuality/nudity.