Review: The Lives Of Others

Given our new political realities involving terrorism, war, anti-science fundamentalists, challenges to free speech and environmental disaster, something like the socialist society in East Germany seems worlds away. In fact, it seems a little bit like science fiction of the George Orwell mold.

Fascism, in little drabs and slivers, lives on certainly, but not in the backwards Soviet forms that can play alternately like nostalgia and kitsch in films. In a movie like 2006’s “The Lives of Others,” which won the Oscar for best foreign film, the whole situation does seem a little unreal and, at times, cliché. We’ve seen it all before in films like “Brazil,” and it’s been so long since the real thing existed that much of it only exists on the frontiers of our memory. Imagine, there are people alive today for whom the fiction of “1984” is probably far more vivid than the reality of pathetic little East Germany.

“The Lives of Others” is a spy film with a twist, in that the act of spying, of becoming immersed in the lives and thoughts of others, can be a point of empathy toward the enemy, especially when your own ideals have let you down. A loyal Stasi captain (portrayed with a perfect anguished reserve by Ulrich Muehe) begins to spy on a playwright (Sebastian Koch) and his actress girlfriend (Martina Gedeck) at the order of the culture minister (the wonderfully icky Thomas Thieme).

Koch’s character is perceived as a friend of the state, one of the few artists who can be trusted not to use his work to criticize it, but the culture minister is blackmailing the girlfriend for favors and is convinced the playwright will make even the slightest slip-up that will be his downfall.

As the plot proceeds, Muehe takes in the beauty of the playwright’s artistic interest and measures it against his cohorts, who swerve from the purity of party ideals for their own gain. Won over, Muehe begins to act as a silent partner of his own devising as Koch begins to drift into real sedition and Gedeck into self-destruction.

One of the beauties of director Florian Henckel von Donners-marck’s impressive debuts — and no doubt the reason it took an Oscar — is its clear accessibility. It is an easy-to-digest suspense concoction for American audiences, it does not seem like a foreign movie. It very skillfully presents this foreign and faraway land as populated by people who are just like us now, in 2007, in America.

As portrayed in “The Lives of Others,” it’s easy to see why East Germany is so forgettable. It was filled with unimaginative bureaucrats who bought into ideals, but were never so special as to devise any. It is politics as “The Office,” but painted in gray and adorned with austere, no form but highly functional, decor. Whereas the Soviet Union at least elicited a certain dark romance, East Germany was just the dullest form of evil you could imagine and now it is gone and seldom deemed interesting enough to resurrect.

This is all very odd if you grew up while it existed, where all spy movies and TV shows included East German agents alongside the Russian ones. If “24” was being made in 1976, there would be a lot of East German action for Jack Bauer and he would likely find it as sparse and depressing as it seemed.

Of course, the chestnut that is “the mundanity of evil” is always worth addressing, as the case of Scooter Libby attests, and East Germany is territory that has not been mined often enough for exploring it. “The Lives of Others” shows a different side from all those spy stories back in the ’70s, when the shadow of Soviet communism seemed to stretch on the land much further than it ever could in reality. Stagnant pools do not grow and that is what von Donnersmarck reveals — the lively bursts of constantly renewing fountains will always overtake those the little puddles of death. That is a lesson that governments of all stripes never seem to learn.

As they say, “you can’t stop progress,” and that includes social and political progress.