When you get right down to it, it's not all that surprising that The Lives of Others managed to snatch this year's Best Foreign Film Oscar away from the significantly more deserving Pan's Labyrinth. Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's debut feature is just the sort of movie the Academy can't seem to get enough of — a sound, sober, professionally crafted political thriller with clearly demarcated lines between right and wrong and, once you nibble away at the tough exterior, a gooey and almost cloying center.
The movie takes place in East Germany during the bad old days of the cold war, with the entire country trembling under the boot of the Stasi, the GDR's all-powerful secret police. The exact year is 1984 (subtlety not being the film's strong suite), a time of fear and paranoia that von Donnersmarck dutifully parallels with our modern era. Ulrich Muehe stars as a mid-level Stasi drone assigned to spy on a vaguely boho writer (Sebastian Koch) whose plays are toothless enough to be government-sanctioned but who has made the mistake of becoming involved with a woman also desired by a powerful government minister (Thomas Thieme).
The Lives of Others is actually a good deal more engaging than its romantic triangle plot-point suggests, and the performances are uniformly solid, but the film's brush strokes become increasingly broad as it progresses, to the point where it's a bit difficult to take this oh-so-serious film all that seriously. The Stasi company man's sensitive side begins emerging as, over the course of his covert surveillance of the playwright, he unexpectedly finds himself grooving on poetry and Beethoven — and, by the grand finale, both the loyal spy and the spied-upon writer are experiencing perfectly synchronized moral transformations that seem to have less to do with the way the world works than with having audiences feeling good about their place in it.
The Lives of Others (NR) Stars Ulrich Muehe, Sebastian Koch, Martina Gedeck and Thomas Thieme. Opens March 16 at Tampa Theatre. Call theater to confirm. 3 stars
This article appears in Mar 14-20, 2007.