Director / writer: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Photography: Hagen Bogdanski
Music: Stephane Moucha, Gabriel Yared
Editor: Patricia Rommel
Cast: Ulrich Muhe, Martina Gedeck, Sebastian Koch, Ulrich Tukur, Thomas Thieme, Volkmar Kleinert, Hans-Uwe Bauer, Charly Hubner, Herbert Knaup
The Lives of Others is set in 1984, which is an interesting choice for a movie made in 2006. Because the picture resonates with the totalitarian surveillance-state themes of George Orwell's 1984 novel, it feels futuristic, technocratic, and dystopian. Yet because the events occur in East Germany, a country that no longer even exists, it reminds us 1984 is in the past, inevitably casting a kind of insinuating nostalgic mist over it, even in the TV style setups it often uses, moving like a quiet BBC miniseries with lots of interior scenes. The casual propaganda-tinged statements about what's good or not good for socialism feel quaint and naïve. Yet more than anything The Lives of Others exists in the here and now of its own time, in this case the late period of the Bush/Cheney administration and its extensive rollout of a surveillance state (under which we, meaning basically the whole world, still live), reminding us that events like these are neither future nor past but vividly pressing issues of the moment.
Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) is a true believer and agent of Stasi, East Germany's intelligence and secret police, which the film notifies us early numbered some 100,000 direct employees and 200,000 paid informants. Its greatest preoccupation appears to be with people defecting to the West. Wiesler is so good at his work that he also teaches at university and the first thing we see is his classroom instruction on interrogation techniques, including long interviews, lie detection, sleep deprivation, deception and threats, etc. Like many in law enforcement roles, Wiesler has a mental frame that tends toward seeing criminals and criminal activity everywhere he looks. Just so, he's got a hunch that the celebrated East German writer Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) is not the state-loving boy scout everyone thinks he is. If Wiesler can get something on him it will be good for Wiesler's boss, Oberstleutnant Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), so he's given the latitude to open a full investigation—and we get a good view of what a full investigation in East Germany looked like.
The Lives of Others is a quiet and methodical movie, much like the surveillance work it chronicles. Making scenarios like these compelling is one of the hardest tasks in movies—computer hacking stories are equally tricky—because so much of the action is static, scrolling messages on a monitor, overheard conversation in headphones, fingertips twitching at a keyboard, eyeballs straining in monitor glow (no surprise one of the most overused bits is someone hunched at a keyboard, saying, "We're in" ). Movies The Lives of Others may resemble include Francis Coppola's The Conversation, Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, and Brian De Palma's Blow Out, solving many of these problems in similar ways, chiefly with repetitive editing, shifting graphic textures, and quicker cuts as part of slow and painstaking investigation, setting visual rhythms that keep it interesting as information is disclosed or uncovered.
At the same time the narratives are strong, though it may take some patience in the first half of The Lives of Others as it builds its intricate story complexities. Wiesler's instincts were right, of course. The writer Dreyman is producing subversive literature and agitating for causes even as he presents his patriotic state-supporting face to the rest of the East German world. When a friend's suicide prompts Dreyman to write an article anonymously for the West German Spiegel about the suppression of suicide statistics in East Germany, the Stasi throws all its resources into uncovering who it is.
Wiesler knows full well by then, as do we, but a funny thing has happened on the way to this plot point. Wiesler changes when he realizes a sordid transaction is driving all the institutional support he receives for the investigation. The man whom Wiesler's boss Grubitz reports to, Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme), wants to take Dreyman's girlfriend Christa-Marie Sieland (Martina Gedeck) as a mistress. He has already begun manipulating her drug addiction to extort sexual favors and now he wants Dreyman out of the way. As a result, Wiesler has decided to protect Dreyman and Sieland to the best of his limited abilities.
A powerhouse drama ensues. The Lives of Others is one of those rare great things, a movie whose second half is better than the first. Much of that is due to laying out all the details and how they interconnect to get us to the intense dramatic climax. Everything that might feel slow or pointlessly detailed early has its payoff late and they're all good. The one point I stumble on a little is Wiesler's overnight change, which could be a matter of such extremes even across the span of a reasonably long movie, going from torture-promoting zealot with ice water to knowingly throwing away his career for ideals. But once I accept he's done it, by the second half, I'm all in. It's one of the best thrillers I know, among other things. It has great lessons about life and faith and unintended consequences. It's sinister and ripe with political corruption. And it's all part of a world that's technically gone now, even though it also looks like just yesterday's TV reruns.
Tonight on Maddow she juxtaposed Trump refusing to respond to subpoenas with Nixon doing the same ab six months b/f he resigned. We need the tapes! Apparently, a lot of the GOP stuck to Nixon until the last minute, but it's still hard right now to imagine any offenses worse than the many he's already perpetrated, any crime that'd finally turn the GOP against him. What I remember particularly liking ab this movie was how the surveillance culture, the secretiveness, duplicity, painful compromises, the corruption sits on everything like a seedy residue.
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