Long live tragedy!

Rating: 10/10 (31 March 2007)

When everybody calls a movie "the movie of the year", "an instant classic", etc., you suspect hype. This time it's not hype. It's heartening to see people respond so strongly to a film that's simply deep and true and doesn't sugar-coat its message. I think audiences are responding to something we don't get enough of at the movies: tragedy.
The debased word "tragedy" gets attached these days to anything sad -- in newspaper headlines about teenagers killed in drunk driving accidents, for example. As a result it's easy to forget that tragedy is really a way of seeing, of apprehending the deepest, most painful truths about ourselves, especially when this self-knowledge comes too late to save us. Oedipus, King Lear, Hedda Gabler...through suffering they see the truth about their lives, and take us on a journey that makes us question ours.
Every once in a while a character in a movie takes us on that journey and reaches this kind of tragic self-awareness. Bogart at the end of "High Sierra". Kevin Spacey's character at the end of "American Beauty". More than one character in "The Lives of Others" attains this sort of tragic vision, and the amazing thing about this superb film is how quietly it happens -- since all of the characters are under surveillance, can't talk to each other except in code, can't show any outward signs. This is a triumph of narrative and of acting.
It's about the East German experience and you probably couldn't find a better way to understand that experience (if you don't know anyone who was there) than seeing this film. ("Goodbye Lenin" got the cultural trappings but couldn't make up its mind whether to be a satirical farce or a sentimental drama and subsequently failed as both.) But the totalitarian setting really serves to throw into sharp relief the film's deeper concerns, about the consequences of our betrayals (of ourselves and of others); and about how human empathy and decency can find a way to operate in our lives, no matter what system we have to operate within.
There's no CGI, no jumbled chronology, no easy dichotomy of good and bad. Just an intricate, absorbing and absolutely true story (in the sense that "fiction is a lie that tells the truth"). Just excellent acting and directing, not a word or movement wasted. And hard-won, quiet redemption that because of the system's restraints comes too late to avert tragedy. The way redemption happens in real life, not in bathetic spectacles like "Crash". Deep down, audiences are responding to truth, which is something we're all starved for.