The Spy Who Loved Me (Page 2)

Now, to return to my two-picture sample of European prizewinners: The industry that rewarded The Lives of Others and Grbavica has thereby shown itself to be entirely comfortable with art, or at least aspirations to it. Both of these pictures express an almost pious faith in music and literature--and, by extension, film--to awaken the conscience and heal wounds. This isn't a theme you encounter in the average American Oscar nominee.

But then, neither does the average Oscar nominee pretend that art's transformative power has been set in motion simply because it's been invoked. In this year's Best Picture candidates, problems that were intractable stay that way: Soldiers who fight against impossible odds are defeated, losers desperately chase after success and fail, crowned heads grudgingly bow before the people's will (while self-styled reformers learn to bow before crowned heads), and the only creature to survive Boston's corruption is a rat. Even Babel, with its urge to tie up the whole global package with a shiny ribbon, acknowledges that some things in the box aren't a gift.

Whether from tough-mindedness or cynicism, this year's Academy voters have been drawn to films that offer no easy resolution. The Europeans, by contrast, give prizes to feel-good art about mass murder, rape and police repression.

What's going on with The Lives of Others and Grbavica?

Set in autumnal East Berlin during the mid-1980s, along colorless and deserted streets, within the rooms of a cluttered old apartment and (most impressive of all) in the actual offices formerly occupied by the Stasi, The Lives of Others is a drama about two men who don't know each other but are both struggling with their conscience, and doing it while obsessing over the same woman.

Georg (Sebastian Koch), a square-jawed 40-ish hunk with flowing movie-star hair, is East Germany's most valued playwright, being the only one who is also read in the West. Though troubled by the silencing of his friends and fellow artists, Georg is a committed socialist who keeps his criticisms within approved limits--which means he might as well be silent. As reward, he gets his plays produced (though not as he'd like them to be) while enjoying the love of his lead actress, Christa-Maria (Martina Gedeck), a beauty who is robust enough to look convincing when cast as a factory worker and yet can boogie fetchingly at an opening-night party, where East Germany's hottest combo plays jazz that's twenty years out of date.

Georg is loyal to the state, and life for the most part is good; but his happiness reads as arrogance when spied by a spare and lonely Stasi captain, Gerd Wiesler. Played by the astonishing Ulrich Mühe, who for this role must convey depths of feeling with a repertory of the tiniest twitches and flickers, Wiesler is a level-eyed man with receding close-cropped hair. He looks something like Kevin Spacey, if Spacey had been bitten by a rat and was turning into Max Schreck. When ordered to begin full surveillance of Georg, this severe man sets to work with controlled fury, willingly sitting all day in the attic above Georg's apartment and listening to his every move. "They unwrap presents," Wiesler types into his report after Georg's birthday party, "then presumably have intercourse." You hear Wiesler's anger, and envy, clacking in every keystroke.

What happens next you already know. Wiesler, infatuated with Christa-Maria, begins wanting to protect her and the man she loves. Meanwhile Georg, shocked by the destruction of a cherished colleague, at last makes plans to speak out. His struggle is the easy one. The hard choices are made by Wiesler (who must play a double game) and by Christa-Maria, who has attracted the attentions of a heavily panting member of the party's central committee. As this tubby villain pressures her, under the shocked surveillance of Wiesler, The Lives of Others turns into a melodrama about a woman tied to the railroad tracks--or, rather, to a commissar's crotch.

I like melodramas. I also like the way this one downplays the dashing, conventional hero in favor of zipped-up Wiesler, who has understood (rather late, I think) that his bosses have no principles, only power. It doesn't bother me at all that the movie makes its Stasi captain into a victim of the regime, and even a rescuer. But then, The Lives of Others also makes Wiesler an artist of sorts. It uses a piece of piano music to convert him--see, he's sensitive!--and by the end has positioned him as Georg's ideal reader. If you think of Georg as a surrogate for the film's director, then the whole misty-eyed audience is redeemed at the end, not through anything it has done but merely through watching this display of artfulness by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.

How he loves us! How we--some of us, anyhow--have rushed to thank him!

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