Film Review

The Lives of Others

The recent film “The Lives of Others” is one of the best films I’ve seen in a long, long, time. So often my experience with films that have “buzz” is that all the praise being heaped upon the film is so much flim-flam. I remember a number of years ago hearing all about Quentin Tarrantino’s films. Each time one came out, much of the movie-viewing public always went wild. The films were always so entertaining and clever everyone said. When I finally decided to get around to seeing Mr. Tarrantino’s movies, I always came away with the feeling that what everyone had been saying was right—his movies were just that—clever. They were also pretentious and insecure in the worst way—they used violence, juvenile humor, and oblique references to make a kind of pastiche. In the end Tarrantino’s movies, like the worst of Woody Allen’s, are all about himself. Oooh…Tarrantino is so cool.

“The Lives of Others” is nothing like this. I don’t remember the name of the director or the star. Few or none of the actors are brand names. It’s a German movie! No one in North America sees foreign movies anymore. And Americans are allergic to learning anything about life from elsewhere. So all the more reason why “The Lives of Others” is so important. In crossing the boundaries of the expected “The Lives of Others” accomplishes that which is most difficult in art–it reminds us how and why we are human. 

In recounting the conversion of an East Berlin Stasi (The East German secret police) agent from obedient functionary to romantic rebel the film shows the extraordinary power of art to change our lives. Captain Wiesler is an interrogator in the Stasi assigned by his superior to bug the home of a theater director suspected of dissident tendencies. Wiesler sets up an elaborate bugging system in the attic of the director’s apartment building that records all the conversations going on below in the director’s apartment. Wiesler listens in on lovemaking, birthdays, get-togethers, and yes, dissident conversations. At first Wiesler is the consummate spy, the perfect observer, always objective and always committed to his duty to root out disloyalty.

But in a move that can only be described as the power of art itself to move us, the conversations and lives unfolding below become a piece of theater and Wiesler, the watcher, is slowly pulled out of his objectivity to fall in love with the characters whose lives are unreeling beneath him. Their own terrors and fears and sadnesses finally begin to affect Wiesler’s own outlook, and we begin to see his own terrible loneliness and the emptiness that marks his life. As Wiesler watches those below him, we watch him, sharing in the powerful drama.