Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s surveillance thriller is tense, humane and carried by Ulrich Mühe’s patient performance. Its faith in personal goodness occasionally makes a brutal political system look too easily understood, but we recommend it warmly.
The Lives of Others makes a gripping thriller out of surveillance without allowing us to forget who has the power. In East Germany, Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler is assigned to watch the playwright Georg Dreyman, and the intrusion extends to Dreyman’s actress girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland. We recommend it warmly, chiefly for Ulrich Mühe, whose performance makes the simple business of listening difficult to watch. Writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck asks how closely someone can attend to other people’s lives while continuing to treat them as material for an investigation.
Mühe is careful about how much he lets us read in Wiesler. He makes us study a face that seems determined to disclose as little as possible, giving each suggestion of doubt unusual force. We were frightened by his concentration: the listening itself feels invasive, even before we consider what might be done with the information. Donnersmarck understands that the prospect of being understood by the wrong person can be enough to sustain a scene.
Sebastian Koch’s Dreyman and Martina Gedeck’s Sieland have the harder task of making the people under scrutiny feel like more than a case worth caring about. Koch gives the playwright enough ease to prevent him becoming a ready-made emblem of resistance. Gedeck is particularly good at making vulnerability feel uncomfortable rather than inviting our sympathy on cue. Their relationship gives the surveillance something personal to damage, though Donnersmarck is occasionally too eager to arrange our sympathies in advance. We are rarely left uncertain about where decency lies.
Hagen Bogdanski’s cinematography keeps the colours subdued, and that suits a film in which people have reasons not to draw attention to themselves. Silke Buhr’s production design makes this a drab place to live, without making every image equally dull. The restraint keeps our attention on the people under scrutiny and on the man studying them. It also makes the surveillance feel like ordinary work, which is more disturbing than presenting it as an exceptional act of wickedness.
Patricia Rommel’s editing keeps the act of watching and the lives being watched clearly connected. We can understand the danger without having to stop and reconstruct who knows what, an important achievement in a thriller about information. At 137 minutes, though, the film sometimes restates what an earlier exchange has already made clear. The music by Gabriel Yared and Stéphane Moucha can be similarly insistent, steering us towards a feeling Mühe has already earned without help. Neither problem undoes the tension, but both suggest a little less confidence in the audience than the performances deserve.
The larger reservation concerns Donnersmarck’s faith in the possibility of personal goodness inside the secret police. His screenplay gives that possibility persuasive human detail, but the moral choices can look tidier than the circumstances should allow. This is a familiar danger in political thrillers: one person’s conscience can become an easier subject than the power exercised over everyone else. We do not need a history lesson, but we do need the film to resist making its central question too comfortable. Give it an uninterrupted evening; the faces need as much attention as the conversations.
