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Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others, now available on DVD, is the best feature film debut by a director since Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. Coming it seemed out of nowhere and defying all the conventional wisdom of the motion picture industry, Donnersmarck achieved a remarkable commercial and critical success with his first full-length film, culminating when it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Picture of 2006.
The Lives of Others fully deserves all the awards it garnered. Evidently a perfectionist, Donnersmarck created a film that is near perfect in every respect. It deals seriously and profoundly with an important but sadly neglected subject—communist tyranny in East Germany—and the screenplay Donnersmarck carefully crafted over several years does full justice to his central theme of injustice. Contractually in full control of the production, Donnersmarck worried endlessly over the details and got them all right—historically and aesthetically. With creative costuming, location scouting, and artistic design, his production team captured the look and feel of the DDR (the German Democratic Republic) in the 1980s, above all in the predominantly grey color scheme of the film that subliminally establishes how drab and bleak life was under communist rule in the East. The musical score similarly contributes to the atmospheric quality of the film. The composer Gabriel Yared does not go in for grand and obvious musical effects, but he is operatic in one respect: by subtly employing Wagnerian leitmotifs, he underlines crucial moments in the drama and helps to structure it.
Above all, for a low-budget production, The Lives of Others is extravagantly cast (impressed by Donnersmarck's screenplay, the actors and actresses worked for a fraction of their normal fees). The leading roles are all filled to perfection, and Donnersmarck pestered major German-speaking performers to play the minor roles, with the result that some of the actors turn in impressive performances without even having any lines to speak. What really ensures that The Lives of Others will be remembered as a great motion picture is the gripping performance by Ulrich Mühe as its central character, Gerd Wiesler, a captain in the East German secret police, the infamous Stasi. Working through understatement and a chilling economy and precision of gesture, Mühe simply nails his role as a cold-blooded interrogator and surveillance expert. In the way he manages to convey the spiritual emptiness and quiet desperation of his character, Mühe invites comparison with Gene Hackman in Coppola's The Conversation (another film about spying, one that Donnersmarck seems to have in mind and even perhaps to echo consciously toward the end of his movie, in a scene of debugging an apartment). Having been a star of East German theater and having suffered under Stasi surveillance himself, Mühe seemed poised for international stardom as a result of his portrayal of Wiesler, but, alas, he died of stomach cancer in July of 2007. At least before he died, he got to play the role of a lifetime.
There is a great deal that is dark about The Lives of Others, both in its background and in the film itself, but lest I give the impression that it is some ponderous German art film, to be suffered through, not enjoyed, I hasten to add that on one level it is a spy thriller, with enough twists and turns to keep audiences on the edge of their seats. And although the film is deeply depressing in what it shows about totalitarianism, it also is uplifting in what it shows about the human capacity to resist and even triumph over the most tyrannical system. After all, the film ultimately chronicles the fall of the DDR and its most hated symbol, the Berlin Wall. Donnersmarck balances the many despicable characters in his story with many likeable ones, and the film even has its comic moments, including the funniest Erich Honecker joke I've ever heard. Although by Hollywood standards The Lives of Others is pitifully lacking in big-budget special effects—not a single car chase!—it has enough action and romance elements to work as entertainment.
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