In one of the tightest thrillers of the year, writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck takes an all-too-real chapter out of German history and presents it in narrative form.
The result is a triangle of tortured human emotions run through the wringer of corrupt and collapsing Eastern European communism. Set in East Germany in the five years before Glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the film features the brutal and morally vacant Stasi, the East German Secret police, in their surveillance of a suspect couple of artists.
Martina Gedeck plays Christa-Maria Sieland, a beautiful diva of the stage and Sebastian Koch plays Georg Dreyman, a young and successful playwright just beginning to see his work widely performed. The two are the subjects of a bugging operation headed by mid-level lieutenant / bureaucrat Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler played by Ulrich Mühe.
There is a certain desperation in collapsing totalitarian regimes that makes their last days their worst.
As the guilt of their state-imposed immorality becomes less supported by the success of the overall system, they are slowly crushed under the weight of their transgressions, as they are forced to increasingly crush those whom they seek, but fail, to control.
We saw this in the recently released South African ode, “Catch a Fire” about the apolitical refinery worker (Derek Luke) who is ignited by the futile efforts of the loyal and desperate secret police captain Tim Robbins in turning back the tidal wave of black resistance to the Apartheid regime.
The loyal operative knows the system is failing to deliver on its promise of the vindication of his sins, but he can do nothing but work harder, and sin more, in an attempt to survive.
Going back even further we have the verité theme of Bronwen Hughes’ “Stander,” the story of golden-boy Afrikaner cop who became the most wanted criminal in South Africa in the early 1980s through an apparent attack of conscience after his involvement in the killing of civilians at an anti-apartheid rally.
And, of course, it would be wrong to omit America’s own fascist witch-hunt, the McCarthy trials from the late 1940s to the late 1950s during which U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy brought his little bit of Stalinism to the US in ruining the lives of mainly artists and performers who fell into his cross-hairs.
Although, like the Stasi trials, most of McCarthy’s smear-tactic verdicts were later overturned, the deaths by suicide and the permanent damage to the creative spirit could not be overturned. As the Stasi commander gloats, “We keep them in a permanent state of terror. Some never write again.”
In von Donnersmarck’s work Stasi agent Wiesler bugs the artist’s apartment and takes scrupulous notes of their every conversation and activity as he has been trained to do in postwar Germany, the birthplace of the modern bureaucracy.
But in the end he is incapable of maintaining his distance from his subjects. It what is supposed to be a scientist monitoring his subjects, Wiesler becomes one of the subjects. He becomes incapable of maintaining a distance between his profession and his person, slowly but surely drawn into their lives and accepting responsibility for their fate.
But this story is only part of a larger story in which Minister Bruno Hempf, the top dog in the security apparatus, is also watching over the couple while unaware of the slippage in Wiesler’s objectivity.
Caught in the middle is Lieutenant Grubitz who is apparently doing his job as the man in the middle. Although he, too, is drawn into the personal lives of both his superior and his staffer he does his best to turn his back on the decay and impending collapse around him.
In the final chapter, the Berlin wall comes down and victim Dreyman is given access to the secret Stasi records. This nice twist allows writer von Donnersmarck to reunite Dreyman with his unknown observer and complete the circle of events surrounding himself, his lover, Wiesler and Minister Hempf.
Some survive and some do not, but nobody comes through the experience unchanged. They have all been pushed to things that luckier humans will never even see.
Exceptional performances by Martina Gedeck and Sebastian Koch as the suspect couple and Ulrich Mühe as agent Wiesler, combined with the taught writing and directing of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck make this one of the best thrillers of the year.
The faithful treatment of a vitally important, if repugnant, period in Germany’s past provides the gift of a lesson learned as well. At least to those who are capable of learning.
Lives of Others
Opens February 9 limited USA MPAA: Rated R for some sexuality/nudity
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