Very still lives
I can't find the link now, but the Guardian recently sent a surveillance expert along to that much-praised, Oscar-winning film, The Lives of Others, to see what a professional eavesdropper would make if it. He was less than overwhelmed: it was, he declared, in no-nonsense manner, like watching paint dry. At which I snorted, and said to myself, how can you expert a technician to understand the subtleties of a profound psychological drama? At that point, though, I hadn't actually seen the movie, although I'd read a fair amount about it.
Well, I finally caught up with it last night, and all I can say is that the amateur film critic was right. Give that man a column. I can't remember the last time I was so disappointed with a foreign hit. (Actually, I can - it was the bizarrely over-rated melodrama, The Page Turner.) How on earth did the press pack fall for this one? The Lives of Others certainly has a lot going for it in terms of its subject - the sordid underbelly of East Germany and its secret police force - but the characterisation is one-dimensional, the pacing is ponderous in the extreme and the storyline is full of unexplained holes. I never for a second believed the central character's conversion into a good guy, and I never really cared about the noble playwright, his cripplingly neurotic actress-girlfriend or the Party bigwig who lusts after her.
Would a ruthless Stasi official with an exemplary 20-year record really be thrown by overhearing bohemian pillow talk and vague talk about freedom in the West? Did I really learn anything original about the lives of dissidents? No. What we saw was a promising idea sabotaged by a muddled and undernourished script. I have no idea what prompted John Podhoretz to say "it joins Citizen Kane, no less, on the very short list of the most impressive debut films in the history of cinema." So far, as a matter of fact, I haven't yet seen a single less than laudatory review. Baffling, absolutely baffling. OK, the fact that my local art-house charged me £4.70 for a glass of white wine put me in a slightly bad mood at the start of the evening. But this was a film that I wanted to enjoy. All I experienced instead was another of my Ricky Gervais moments: what is it that the others see, that I can't?
UPDATE: As Matthew d'Ancona points out from his stool in the Coffee House, Timothy Garton Ash has a long and thoughtful essay about the film in the NY Review of Books. While he says the film deserved its Oscar, his piece has more to say about the socio-political background. He does add this, however: Wiesler's own conversion, as shown to us in the film, seems implausibly rapid and not fully convincing—despite a wonderfully enigmatic performance by the East German actor Ulrich Mühe. It would take more than the odd sonata and Brecht poem to thaw the driven puritan we are shown at the beginning.
UPDATE 2: I'm relieved to see that Kevin Drum agrees with me. His commenters make lots of interesting observations, pro and con. If only the film critics could have been that nuanced.