50th post!! Review: The Lives Of Others

Review: The Lives Of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006, USA).

The Lives of Others is a film which has two contreversial apsects attached to it, one not nearly as serious as the other, I will add. The first, lighter one, is that it took the Foreign Language Oscar this year, beating out the hotly tipped, Pan's Labyrinth, a film which won other Oscars also. Many people have asked whether this film can be better than Pan's, considering that that film is steeped in almost unanimous critical acclaim. The second is far more serious, as critics have condemned the film for portraying a member of the Statsi, the German Secret Police, as a sympathetic character, when it was known that it could never have happened in real life. These are noth issues I will address in this review. A warning: considering the subject matter, this review is going to be more academic than most of mine, and I will be quoting from varying sources (all of which will be credited honestly, and not presented as my own ideas).
Wiesler (Ulrich Muhle) is a member of the Statsi who specialises in interrogation and surveillance. He is assigned by his superior, and long-time friend Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur) to spy on a playwright and his actress girlfriend (Sebastian Koch & Martina Gedeck, respectivley), an outwordly respected couple who tow the line of the GDR in oublic, but is suspected of more by both Wiesler and Grubitz's boss, Minister Hempf (Thomas Thieme). Wiesler becomes attached to his subjects and finds himself being influenced by them, and soon, influences the course of events to come.
From the start of this film, we immeadiately know exactly where our main characters are at in their lives. We are first presented to Wiesler as the emotionally dead husk of a man he is supposed to be. Donnersmarck presents this in two ways, by what is said and what is shown. He is teaching a class of future Statsi agents and he tells them of how exactly to break a liar. When a student says that the treatment given is "inhuman", Wiesler is quick to say that these people are traitors and need to be treated harshly. We then see him look at a plan of the room and put a cross by this student's name. Wiesler knows exactly what is needed and that is people who do not question the methods. It is people who feel deeply that what the Statsi do is right and that is all they have to think. It is known that Statsi agents were all like this in real-life, they were fully indoctrined into this way of thinking and this is something shown clearly from the start. Even Wiesler's clothing and style of life shows that his life is uniform. He is literally shown "buttoned-up" his shirt completly done up and his jacket also. His hair is cut to within an inch of his life and the colours he wears are dull. The flat we later see him living in is drab, grey again, and the only sign of any culture are a few books which seem to be more for show than for anything else. By contrast, Dreymer and his girlfriend are presented as flamboyant, we see them early on dancing, enjoying themselves fully. A later scene shows that Dreymer is so unlike Wiesler and the Statsi that he does not even know how to do up a tie. His shirt is unbuttoned for most of the film. In his flat, there is almost a sense of bohomie, of recklessness and a style whch was very much unwelcome to East Germany at the time. It is to Donnersmarck's credit that he is able to bring both visual elements and storytelling together to make the contrasts so simple to grasp.
So the plot of the film has had many people up in arms. What Wiesler does through the course of the film, as said earlier, would never have happened in real-life. These men believed vehemently and as Anna Funder says in her article "Eyes Without A Face" in the May 2007 issue of "Sight & Sound", many of them still believe the principles and denounce those who speak against them. It is not like the example of Stalinist Russia or even Nazi Germany in that in those cases, many claimed they were just following orders; in East Germany under the GDR, those who acted truly believed it was the best whether it be for their own ends or for their country. That is where the problem of Wiesler's character really comes into play. He seems to believe what he is doing to a point of almost too much intensity even for his friend Grubitz. The course of the film, and the ways in bwhcih he intervene, can certainly come off as too simplistic, in film-making terms, or offensive if you take it as something based on reality, which given the realism of the rest of the film, is a valid way to come at the film. I would argue that Donnersmarck's juxtaposition of Wiesler, Dreyman, Grubitz, and Hempf validates the course of Wiesler's character. Grubitz, Wiesler's friend is presenetd as a man who will do what he can to get ahead. He acknowledges early that he steals Wiesler's ideas and indeed the starting of spying on Dreyman is suggested by Wiesler but stolen by Grubitz. He is getting ahead while Wiesler is stuck doing the donkey work. Hempf is the man Grubitz is looking like becoming. Bloated, powerful and capable of dispicable acts (including a borderline rape sequence which is the most disconcerting thing I have seen since Gaper Noe's Irreversible. Hempf is a disgusting man who through the GDR has become powerful, something Wiesler is very much not. So then Wiesler? If he had been in a postion of power, I think his transformation would have been far less realisitc. Hempf and Grubitz have filled their worlds with temporary happiness, and just want more power. Wiesler has othing, he has monotonous sex with a prostitute to try and jave the emptional fulfillment Hempf gets in his blackmailing, and Dreyman gets in his love for his girlfriend. His eyes become open to the world though Dreyman and indeed the more he becomes involved the more he starts to feel about the impact he is making in other people's lives, and in a strange way the happier he seems to become. His reading of Brecht makes him happy and indeed, his clothing becomes looser even, his sirt becoming unbuttoned, visually starting to replicate Dreyman. This transformation is done in an even-handed and, in the context of the film, a satisfactory way. The key for me is that Wiesler never seems to acknowledge that what the Party is doing is wrong. Indeed, his transformation is emotional not moral. His actions of interfering with the invetigation is more of an act of friendship, one of protecting those he has become attached to, rather than protecting the messgae Dreyman is trying to get to the West. Wiesler changes very little and indeed his victory is a personal one, he is able to break out of the life he was living and in the very last sequence of the film, finds that his actions did not go unnoticed. Wiesler does not become successful, he doesn't gain from his actions but he seems to achieve a kind of inner peace.
So... the rest of the cast. Uniformly excellent, all great, I'm a bit drained in truth so I will say just that. The script is superb, not an inch of fat on it, and it works as both a character piece and an involving thriller, and that is very much to Donnersmarck's credit. The direction is also superb, he achieves a sense of geography that a lesser director would screw up and the fact that he is a debut director is suprising.
Onto the second question. Better than Pan's? These are two very different films in some ways but the themes of opression and the human spirit rising above it is shared through both. The ways both show this could not be more different however. I would have to call it a tie, I could not decide between the two and it will take another watch of both before I could decide. However, what I will say is that this is an engaging, thought-provoking, sad, haunting, but strangely uplifting number of a film and I very much recommend it to anyone interested in serious, adult cinema.

I'll have thoughts up on various topics as and when, the next review will be for El Topo which will be up late on Saturday or Sunday morning. Thanks as always for reading.