Not nearly as good as it could have been

Rating: 6/10 (12 April 2007)

The premise is interesting, the acting is good, the subject matter is extremely important and more than a little malnourished in Hollywood cinema, the characters are engaging, the camera pulls it weight . . . in short, there's a lot that's working with this movie, but unfortunately, it isn't quite enough to lift it above the ravages of mediocrity.
Chief among the offenses is the fact that the entire story relies on an ill-defined protagonist, Wiesler of the Stasi, a man introduced to us as the epitome of the heartless bureaucratic killing machine who ends up capitulating to sentiment. The film tries to justify this shift by stripping Wiesler's mission of legitimacy a quarter of the way through the film: Christa-Marie (CM), one of the subjects of the investigation, is having an illicit affair with Bruno Hempf, Wiesler's superior and the authorizer of the operation. Hempf hopes to imprison Dreyman, the boyfriend of CM and Wiesler's primary subject, with no higher aim than ridding himself of a romantic rival.
This revelation  and Wiesler's disgust upon discovering it  offers adequate justification for the aging operative's loss of enthusiasm for his mission. Unfortunately, it offers no justification whatsoever for why he continues protecting Dreyman after the struggling writer actually involves himself in rebellious, anti-Governmental activities. We're left to assume that the predator fell in love with the prey, a difficult supposition, since up until this point, it's not clear that Wiesler is capable of any kind of feeling. In the opening scene, he drives a suspect to hysteria in order to obtain a trivial lead. He reports one of his students to the police because the student used the word "inhuman" to describe the Stasi's practices. He terrorizes Dreyman's neighbor into silence by threatening to interfere with her daughter's education. He chastises a co-worker repeatedly for showing up four minutes late to his shift. In short, there is nothing in Wiesler's character that suggests he is anything other than a man who lives by the book, thinks by the book, and tortures by the book, and all of his allegiances go toward the law.
Why, then, does he take pity on Dreyman? Why does he rescind on his upbringing? Why is this particular mission any different from the hundreds of others that preceded it, aside from the dubious activities of the bigwig who authorized it? If Wiesler is cracking under the pressure of his duty, why don't we see evidence of it beforehand? What separates Wiesler from his peers, who show no sign of compassion whatsoever?
Any film that relies on leaps of faith doesn't pass as art in my book. It's not believable, and it's not compelling.
Add to the equation the heavy-handed editing, the obnoxiously emotive music, and the occasional corny line ("and to think that men like you once ran a country") and you arrive at a movie that, like so many others before it, compromised its chances for greatness and stalled out blandly with "decent."