If You Hate War Movies this is the One for You!

Rating: 10/10 (23 May 2012)

In 1984 East Berlin, an agent of the Stasi conducts surveillance on Georg Dreyman, a successful drama playwright and his longtime companion Christa-Maria Sieland, herself a popular actress. Both were huge intellectual stars in the former East Germany, although they secretly don't always toe the party line. One day, the Minister of Culture becomes interested in Christa. This is when Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler is instructed to observe and sound out the couple but finds himself becoming increasingly absorbed by their lives.
I've only seen this movie once compared to the countless times I've seen Labyrinth and Working Girl. Yet I find myself thinking on this film more than the other two.
Unfortunately, I can't understand German, in spite of living there in my youth, so I had to read the subtitles. I understand why many people don't like them, sometimes the dialogue is so long winded you don't even get to look up before the picture that goes with the words has moved on and you're back to reading again. This movie wasn't like that. The main character Wiesler, or the Watcher as I call him, spoke so infrequently that much of the time could be spent watching him. I believe it was the secret to my bonding so strongly to his character. I got to watch the Watcher, feel his emptiness, to the point he fell in love with the woman he watched, much like I fell in love with him as I watched.
Part of our job as writers, whether screenplays, books or teleplays, is to create a bond between our audience and our characters. Many try to do this by figuring out their viewer- or reader-ship and writing to that kind of person. For example you write a book about a teenager and your audience is a teenager. Many times you create a bond by putting the character in like circumstances to real life. In the Lives of Others the likelihood of a movie watcher being a member of the Stasi isn't very likely. So we as an audience had to be won over another way.
By plumbing these alternate connection techniques we as the writer can develop bonds our audience will follow anywhere. Ulrich Mühe played the Watcher, Gerd Wiesler, so well I couldn't separate the actor from the character in my mind. Since he didn't speak much it wasn't so much what he said but what he emoted.
This isn't the only well-executed element in the film though. In fact there are two more: the playwright, Georg Dreyman, and the actress, Christa-Maria Sieland. I really fell in love with the Playwright as well. Not at first, like the Watcher, but gradually over the course of the story like Wiesler did. The actor really represented here a flawed man and his skill lay in me loving the character in spite of those flaws. He was kind of a coward, understandably, but with a desire to be bold, to rebel. At the end when you realized he already was with another woman, you weren't surprised, and in fact if he hadn't been your belief in him would have been shaken. The more you got to know the Playwright the more flawed he became and the more you liked the man.
Cornerstone to the Playwright was the true love he felt for the actress, Christa. While watching the Actress, the Watcher came to love the Playwright because of the love they shared. Because she loved the Playwright. It's this relationship that made the Watcher's trip possible and allowed the audience to share his journey. I didn't bond with the Actress, in fact, just the opposite. I understood her position between a rock and a hard place, she had an addiction and a career she wanted to maintain. Like the men, I too found her beautiful and chase worthy. But it's actually my lack of connection to her that I found rather poignant. I'd much rather she die than either of the men and yet both would have preferred to take her place, even if the other man would have gotten her. There's something human and real and true about that kind of dichotomy. It makes the Actress as a character love worthy.
One critic I read mentioned perhaps there were too many epilogues, another mentioned the big white shorts of the villain. Part of the actress'es effect on these men were how they proceeded in the future. We needed to see the satisfaction of the Watcher in the choices he made, to know those years of steaming envelopes was worth it. We needed to see the Playwright's boldness bloom and prosper in it's own way. In this we can see the actress'es true and lasting impressions. The big white shorts don't play into it at all.
I'm haunted by this movie. It's not the dialouge or the plot, though these worked together in perfect harmony to make the film the knock out it is. As the years pass, we as human beings seek relationships like these three shared, ones that aren't transient by nature but if they end it's a tragedy. No matter in what media we find it, these are the kinds of experiences we seek to read or watch orwrite.
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