Review of “The Lives of Others”

In “The Lives of Others,” Hauptmann Wiesler (Ulriche Mühe) is the paradigm of the perfect worker for the state. The state is East Germany, or whatever is its offical name before the Berlin Wall fell. The time is the late 80’s or early 90’s.

Wiesler is a believer. He works for the Stasi. That would be the secret police. He believes in spying on whomever and wherever. He believes that enemies of the state lurk everywhere. And should be rooted out by any means of interrogation necessary.

He lives an ascetic life. Other than an occasional foray with an aging whore, or his meals of pasta with sauce from a tube, his work is his sustenance.

The brilliance of this film is that Wiesler, who, in truth, is its central focus, is portrayed as a sympathetic, emotion-inducing human. It is a stunning creation.

He is ordered by his boss, a lower level bureaucrat on the make, to spy on playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). It is believed that Dreyman is an enemy of the state, despite his by-the-rules playwriting credentials. Wiesler bugs the apartment where Dreyman lives with famous actress, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). Wiesler, a man with little else going on, spends his days listening to the lives of those others.

It turns out that the orders to spy on Dreyman really emanate out of jealousy from Minister Hempf (Thomas Thieme), Wiesler’s boss’s boss. He’s having an affair of sorts with Sieland.

And that is all of the plot I intend to share. To reveal more would be to deprive you of the glories of this amazing film.

“The Lives of Others” was written, produced and directed by a fellow without a previous feature-length film to his credit, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. He will be heard from again. The craft here is that robotic workers are humanized, an arid environment becomes exciting to watch, humans evolve in subtle, palpable ways, bureaucracy is chastened and the fallacy of the state’s paranoia is revealed. All in a manner that is watchable, totally engaging, even erotic at times.

Simply stated, “The Lives of Others” is mature movie making of the highest order. Given the subject matter, it is eerily evocative. The film has won something like 25 awards and is deserving of all.