A precisely crafted story about the imprecise nature of circa-80's East Berlin conformity.

Rating: 9/10 (30 January 2007)

First-time writer director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck offers a phenomenal debut achievement. From the opening scene, Lives creates a paranoid, frightening universe that methodically contorts the characters' natures until a satisfying conclusion.
We are first introduced to Captain Gerd Wiesler. In a brilliantly played stoic, naturalistic and nuanced performance by Ulriche Muhe, Wiesler is the best of the worst: an expert in spying, interrogation, and sniffing out anti-socialist sentiment. While instructing a class of will-soon-be East Berlin secret police (Stasi), a student raises his hand and questions one of Wiesler's techniques for being inhumane. Wiesler coolly marks an X next to the students name on the roll sheet.
At the conclusion of class, we meet Lieutenant Colonel Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), an old school friend of Wiesler's who, due to inauthenticity and an ability to schmoose, has risen to a high ranking job in the government. They attend a theater where a play by Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), the best play-write in the East read "in the West", is debuting with Dreyman's lover Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck).
Secretly accused of being too devoted to Socialist Ideals, Wiesler is given the task of digging up dirt on Dreyer. Within 20 minutes the artist's entire apartment is bugged, placing Wiesler in a perch in the attic. As the Stasi listens he discovers not only Dreyer's sincerity of belief but also the true motivation for the order to observe him. An entertainingly nasty government higher-up, Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme), is forcing Sieland into an affair and wants to eliminate his only competition in Dreyer.
A gradual, genuine paradox is spurned in Wiesler as he grows to care greatly for the complete strangers below. On a surface level this seems like an incredible leap. As if Wiesler is just now beginning to understand the effects of a society built on the surveillance and back-stabbing of neighbors, friends, and family. The performances and the writing do pull this off, including a memorable quote from Grubitz, who has exploited and manipulated everyone he could without a true concern for socialistic ideals, "In life it's not grades, it's results. The structure of the story is tight as cord and it is here where you really feel its grip.
When a friend of Dreyer commits suicide, due to an artistic death caused by an indefinite blacklisting for obscure political reasons, Dreyer sets to put his words against the government that he has become disillusioned with. Procuring a difficult to trace typewriter that he hides under the floorboards, Dreyer begins meeting with two subversives who listen to his anti-government essay, read aloud, to give him feedback.
This would be, of course, the perfect opportunity for Wiesler to prove himself and his efforts to his Grubitz, whose next promotion is wedged on pleasing Hempf. Instead, he begins actively covering for Dreyer. This remarkable turn from a cold, menacing Stasi does not play as either a inconsistent or sympathetic to the system of informants and secret police of the past East Berlin. All of the emotional and logical threads of Lives are woven so tightly as to make each transgression by Dreyer and, consequently, by Wiesler seem compelling and natural.
Even when Wiesler's 'conscience' pushes him to turn in Dreyer, he understands that procedure of interrogation and imprisonment well enough to know that Dreyer will die soulfully where Wiesler has grown.
With the expected craft the story has made us come to expect, the subsequent story lines are resolved. With a running time of 137 minutes, the film flashes by quickly largely because of it's intense hold of viewer attention through superior emotional arcs.
The final fifteen minutes, in comparison to the film's whole, seem tacked on as we jump through time to the fall of the Berlin Wall, then again two years to the final passive impacts of Wiesler and Dreyer's on each others lives. This is forgivable -even appreciated- because it acts as the literary equivalent of an afterward. In an engaging, resonate novel it is a matter of course to read that section and so here too, finding out what happens to the character beyond the unity of time and space registers more satisfying then cumbersome.
With seven Lola's this year in Germany and praise at major film festivals world wide, this film is a formidable opponent for the best Foreign Language Oscar against Pan's Labyrinth and Water. With methodically crafted direction, an amazing cast, beautifully fitting cinematography, and an delicate sound screenplay, this film deserves all of the praise it is given.