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Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) is a successful playwright with hot brunette actress live-in lover Christa-Maria (Martina Gedeck). She is coveted by portly and malevolent government official Hempf (Thomas Thieme), who would like to put Dreyman away and have Christa-Maria for himself.
So, Hempf approaches local Stasi boss Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur) and 'requests' he get the goods on Dreyman. Soon, the apartment of the clueless writer is bugged, and Stasi operative Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) listens in on Dreyman's conversations.
At first, it seems that Wiesler is a soulless walking-dead type who will duly record all that Dreyman says and hears, even if it will send the latter to an early grave. But to our surprise, Wiesler quickly develops such sympathy for the playwright that he risks his own career to cover up Dreyman's political crimes, most notably a Western-published article that reveals East Germany has a high rate of suicide. (The country was clearly in need of better television programming).
Actor Ulrich Mühe died of stomach cancer in 2007, and purportedly knew his condition was terminal during filming.
How others will see it. The Lives of Others won the Award for Best Foreign Language Film at both BAFTA and the Oscars. The movie practically swept the German Film Awards, and at the time of writing resides high within the imdb.com Top 250 at #57. At that website, the user ratings are uniformly extremely high, with the sole exception of women under 18 and over 45. Presumably, they found the film to be slow, or just as likely, disliked the only substantial female character, a drug-addicted actress willing to betray her lover (and be pawed by a Stasi boss) in order to salvage her career.
How I felt about it. The Lives of Others is a good film. It is competent in all categories. But it is not the masterpiece that it is claimed to be. Since the movie lacks bells and whistles, slick novelties, or Hollywood marketing, the source of its undeserved high praise is different than, for example, Memento or The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Instead, the film achieved critical glory through political correctness. It depicts the East German government as western propaganda presented it. They were bad, and we won, a message that the general public wants to hear, whether or not it was an oversimplification. I don't know what the German word for 'irony' is, or I would use it here. But here we have a movie successful for the same reason that an East German movie would be: it shows the 'other side' governed by corrupt, evil, and deeply cynical jerks. The irony is increased in that the movie is set in 1984, the same year and title as the famous George Orwell novel about a state where everyone is constantly under surveillance.
Obviously, I am not expressing approval of the East German government. But all governments have bureaucracies that include domestic spies and paid informants. And these spies attempt to intercept the conversations of those believed to be enemies of the state. Democracy is better than any alternative form of government, but it is far from a cure-all, and the message to take from this film should not be a collective pat on the back for defeating communism. Particularly when the contribution involved is merely a statistic on the number of suicides several years ago.
In fact, this film's premise is bogus. A leading East German writer would assume that his house is bugged. In most cases, he would simply write plays that lack political content, and continue to enjoy the good life of a favored East German artist. Now there's a movie unlikely to be made.