Ill-Informed Gadfly

Among its many accomplishments, “The Lives of Others” provides a stark view of all-too-recent history. To someone in my generation, the fall of the Berlin Wall seems long ago. It’s a bit shocking to see such a persuasive evocation of East Germany in the mid-80s, when Gorbachev’s Glasnost programs were starting to transform the Soviet Union but little had changed on the western frontier of the Iron Curtain (I’m sure it was no picnic in the USSR either). “The Lives of Others” depicts an oppressive culture where Socialist hacks quash any dissent. The secret police, known as the Stasi, use surveillance and interrogation to strong-arm citizens into confessing their transgressions. And the arts have been censored into irrelevance. The hero, Georg Dreyman (dashing Sebastian Koch), has carved out a career as a party-line playwright who can finagle nuggets of subversion into his work — but not enough for the Stasi to bother him. Still, Stasi Capt. Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) suggests that Dreyman be placed under surveillance, a move that proves prescient. Dreyman’s favorite director, Albert Jerska (Volkmar Kleinert) has been blacklisted, and the movie watches as Dreyman’s latent activism bubbles to the surface. Writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck skillfully traces the emergence of a fully developed artistic consciousness, as Dreyman comes to discover that writing plays isn’t enough — that a true artist must respond to injustice.

The brilliance of “The Lives of Others” is that Wiesler discovers this too. Assigned to spy on Dreyman, he begins to cover for him. Given a remarkable role — a soulless, voyeuristic servant to the state who, in fact, overflows with empathy — Muhe doesn’t disappoint. He’s an artist, too, in his own way, and he conveys the joy of putting to use everything he’s learned about deception in his years as an interrogator. (The beginning of the movie shows him clinically breaking down a dissident and teaching eager Stasi recruits how to do the same.) He types up reports about Dreyman’s activities that dull any suspicion through their institutional dryness. When Dreyman is working on an expose for the West German magazine Der Spiegel about the government’s refusal to acknowledge the East’s sky-high suicide rate, Wiesler reports that he’s working a patriotic play about Lenin — a ridiculous invention on its face, but one that smug oligarchs are eager to believe.

The trickiest role goes to Martina Gedeck as Dreyman’s live-in girlfriend, the beguilingly named Christa-Maria Sieland (abbreviated as CMS in Weisler’s reports). She encourages her boyfriend’s nascent political outrage, while at the same time she knows she owes her career as an actress to the corrupt politicians who champion her — and she submits to the sexual advances of a high-ranking government minister, Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme). Weisler has a crush on Sieland himself, and his subversion from within begins when he finds out the surveillance of Dreyman is motivated by Hempf’s jealousy — Hempf wants the beautiful actress for himself. Gedeck mixes seductive confidence with self-loathing. You understand why men can’t take their eyes off her, yet you also feel her despair.

Von Donnesmarck has constructed a beautifully intricate plot that ought to be studied in screenwriting classes. The cumulative power of the web of deceit he weaves will leave you exhilarated. As a director, however, he’s a bit dry and artless — music cues come in abruptly; transitions between scenes are nonexistent; and there’s little visual panache. Still, it’s hard to ask more of a movie that’s so complex and satisfying. The ending in particular left me elated, because von Donnesmarck allows his story to embrace its full historical context. After all, he’s showing the end of an era — in a few short years after the main action of the movie, the Wall will come down. The Stasi begins to feel like a bad dream, all too easily forgotten. Yet “The Lives of Others” leaves you with a profound appreciation for the lives wasted by the folly that was East Germany.