The Lives of Others

By now, I've established that I don't get out to the movies much these days. I do, however, read movie reviews ravenously. (I think it's part of the parental urge to remain relevant in, or at least aware of, a world of culture that I fear is passing me by.) And a movie that gets especially good reviews from my favorite reviewers—say, David Edelstein in New York magazine—can bypass Queue Blocker status entirely, no matter what it's about. Such was the case with The Lives of Others, a German film that not only got great reviews, it won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for 2006 (over the amazing Pan's Labyrinth). Not bad.

The story follows Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), a middle manager in the Stasi (the East German secret police) in the early 1980s. This expert and calmly ruthless secret policeman is assigned to spy on a successful playwright, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), who is considered a friend to the state but still bears watching, just in case.

So listening devices are installed in Dreyman's apartment… and Wiesler soon finds out why he's really there: A government minister (Thomas Thieme) is blackmailing Dreyman's girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), into having an affair with him, and wants dirt on Dreyman that will get him out of the way. Weisler, who up to this point has been a true believer in state socialism, is devastated, and his surveillance starts to take on a different, more sympathetic quality toward its subjects—just as Dreyman himself begins questioning the regime and what it's doing to the lives of those close to him.

The plot is fairly simple, even verging on predictable at times; the film lives and dies on the transformation undergone by Wiesler. But in conveying that, the late Mühe offers one of the great performances of the last several years, expressing a vast range of emotions with delicacy and subtlety. This could have been a sappy, over-the-top role—the lonely automaton who finds his heart—but instead, Mühe allows us to only barely perceive the changes in this closed-down man. Because he lets the audience experience them alongside Wiesler himself, the moments of decision and self-discovery, though muted, pack a strong, poignant punch.

Writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck deserves credit for keeping the story clean and spare, which gives his superlative cast ample space to work. Echoing several previous films about surveillance (Coppola's gem The Conversation inevitably comes to mind), he also strikes some nice meta notes on voyeurism: Wiesler's increasing fascination with Dreyman and Sieland quickly starts to resemble that of a soap opera fanatic. But the director has a good sense of how much of this is enough, too; he doesn't let it overwhelm the film.

It can be hard for movies like this to live up to expectations, but if anything, The Lives of Others exceeded ours; as the closing credits ran, Whitney said it was one of the best she's ever seen. I'm not ready to go that far myself—as always, I have to ponder for a while first (it's a disease). But I will say this: It's great, and if you haven't seen it, you should.