The Lives of Others | 
| Director: Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck
Actors: Martina Gedeck, Ulrich M?he, Sebastian Koch, Ulrich Tukur, Thomas Thieme
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Buy New: $14.99
Rating:  244 reviews
Sales Rank: 3593
Genre: Drama
Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: Video On Demand
Running Time: 139 Minutes
ASIN: B000V4NX04
Theatrical Release Date: February 1, 2006
Release Date: September 30, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Synopsis:
This Oscar-winning thriller (Best Foreign Language Film, 2006) tells the erotic story of an East German couple whose every intimate moment is being monitored by the Secret Police hoping to learn information that could destroy their lives. |
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| Customer Reviews: Read 239 more reviews...
 To HGW XX/7, with gratitude February 24, 2007
Andy Orrock (Dallas, TX)
101 out of 106 found this review helpful
Hopefully, Academy members will rightfully award the Oscar tomorrow night for Best Foreign Language Film of the Year (2006) to 'The Lives of Others.' Writer/Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's debut stands head and shoulders not only over the other nominees, but also over all the nominees for Best Picture. That so-called 'best' list pales in comparison to the heights attained by von Donnersmarck's creation. It is a expertly-plotted, richly-told depiction of life under the dominion of the East German spying apparatus, the Stasi.
'Lives' tracks the Stasi's efforts to bug and disrupt the lives of writer Georg Dreyman (a striking Sebastian Koch) and his actress girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland (the incomparable Martina Gedeck). Assigned to the case is Stasi agent, Gerd Wiesler, indelibly played by Ulrich Muehe. The reasons for spying on Dreyman and 'CSM' (as the Stasi calls her)? A Politburo minister has the hots for CSM. That's it. For that most personal of reasons, lives are ruined. A professional reviewer of 'Lives' really hit the nail on the head when he said that the movie turns on the fact that Weisler realizes he is spying into the life of a man who is 'vastly his moral superior.' That's it. You get propelled into Dreyman's life and you are struck immediately and permanently by his decency and the quality of his character. Over time, Weisler starts injecting himself into the proceedings. At that point, the sequence of events is irrevocably changed.
von Donnersmarck's movie is a continual series of one great scene after another. I thought perhaps it had reached its denouement with the fall of the Wall. But it keeps getting better. Dreyman requests his Stasi files. He begins to piece together the story and the role of Weisler.
'The Lives of Others' is 137 minutes of the best entertainment imaginable. Ulrich Muehe is an East German who himself was the target of Stasi oversight. For this film, he was awarded Best Actor at the 2006 European Film Awards. Is there a more just triumph than that?
A Thinking Man's Thriller of Cold War Germany July 5, 2007
Gerard D. Launay (Berkeley, California)
72 out of 78 found this review helpful
I often don't agree with Oscar choices, but this time they got it right.
"The Lives of Others" is one of the most interesting movies about communism that I have seen in a decade; it shows, as few others have, how communism suffocates human imagination...not just stifles political dissent.
A spy - Captain Wiesler - is given the task of eavesdropping on a well known playwright, not for political reasons, but because a communist boss is jealous of the man and wants his female lover for himself. As the spy begins listening in, he begins to question the values of his society and the integrity of his orders.. Up to that point, Wiesler dutifully obeyed without question. But as the spy continues to experience the world of the playwright, he starts to live the subject's life vicariously...so the enemy ironically becomes the friend. The experience helps Captain Wiesler grow in humanity so he ultimately makes the decision to run interference to save the playwright's life.
The film details the transformation of an organization man in a hostile society...and makes us remember the great books of totalitarian dangers such as Animal Farm, Anthem, Brave New World, and of course, 1984. (It is no accident that the key YEAR in which the events take place in this film is indeed 1984). Instead of leaving the viewer in a state of deep negativity, "The Lives of Others" gives us reason to hope, reason to believe that goodness may prevail over corruption. So by the end, I was deeply moved.
The Drone February 22, 2007
MICHAEL ACUNA (Southern California United States)
50 out of 54 found this review helpful
Gerd Weisler (Ulrich Muhe, appropriately drab) is an East German Stasi (Secret Police) drone: the type of man that his superiors count on to "get" his prey. Early on in this fascinating, superior film, Gerd arrives home from a hard day of spying on his fellow East Germans and prepares a meal: microwaved white rice onto which he squeezes tomato paste from a tube. This scene, in its spare, workmanlike manner sets the course and adjusts the sights of this film: the unremarkable, out of hate and jealousy assigned to bring down those deemed different, those deemed remarkable, those deemed talented. Weisler is the perfect Stasi automaton: a socialist monk with ice-cold eyes and an incorruptible true believer's faith in the system he has sworn to defend against "enemies of socialism" no matter where he finds them.
"The Lives of Others" begins in 1984 a particularly Orwellian date and 5 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Weisler is invited to a night of theater by his school friend and boss Colonel Grubitz (a slimy bureaucrat performance by Ulrich Tukor) for a performance of a play written by Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and starring Dreyman's live in girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck from "Mostly Martha"). Dreyman is tall, handsome, dresses in colors other than grey and Christa-Maria is wondrously gorgeous and a great actress to boot.
As Weisler watches Christa-Maria on stage he also scopes in on Dreyman, via his opera binoculars, watching Christa-Maria with love and admiration. The look of distrust and envy in Wailer's eyes is frightening: his eyes widen, squint and widen again. What does Weisler see or sense on that triumphant, for Dreyman and Sieland, night? Is it watching them basking in the glory of an audience's love and appreciation? Is it the palpable love and warmth between the two themselves: something that Weisler has never, will never feel? Whatever it is, Weisler has found his next assignment.
Though Dreyman is deemed "the only writer we have who is not subversive," Weisler forces the issue and sets up a full Stasi surveillance: bugs, cameras and sets up a roost for himself in the attic of the Dreyman-Sieland home.
Then in the process of spying on these two warm, happy, talented, loving people something happens to Weisler: he slowly, through the ugly process of spying, thaws little by little: Weisler falls in love with them and more to the point.., he falls in love with their lives.
First time director, Florien Hinkle von Donnersmarck has produced a remarkable, involving, intelligent film: an intricate, frightening film full of lives caught at the difficult crossroads of patriotism on the one hand and on the other the vortex of individual duty and honor.
you can feel the oppressiveness of the system August 23, 2007
R. M. Williams (tucson, arizona USA)
26 out of 29 found this review helpful
What a powerful movie. I felt the oppressiveness of the system from the movie in a way that i haven't seen since reading Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago". I don't know how anyone survived those decades, let alone how any normal human contact was possible. I wonder even more how anyone in the system like the major character could move from a position of responsibility for interrogations to actively supporting a writer who writes a damning article about suicides in East Germany.
The plot of the movie is actually rather straightforward and linear.
A playwright, a supporter of the regime has a beautiful lover, who is a well known actress.
She is blackmailed into a sexual liaison by a high ranking party member using his threats to end her career or worse.
The official decides to get rid of the playwright-boyfriend using information gained from surveillance by the Stasi on their apartment.
(so far sounds pretty much like David and Bathsheba, she who was the wife of Uriah)
The agent assigned to the case, listens into the lives. While at the same time figures out with his immediate superior that they are being used by the official to further his sexual agenda.
What happens next is that the agent covers up for the playwright's underground activities by submitting false reports that they are involved only in writing a new play, while they are actually moving towards more active resistance to the government.
But the movie isn't about the plot, it is about the character development, in all four major players.
the Stasi supervisor, the agent, the playwright and the actress-girlfriend.
And how the system changes, distorts or reinforces each of their beliefs.
The most interesting one is the agent's movement from a loyal player to a subverter of the system. What are his motivations? are they believable? how far will he go to protect these two people? will he get caught?
it feels like a gripping detective story with lives on the line, with a huge rock ready to drop on anyone of them and poof--into prison.
It is how they adapt to the pressures, how they continue to live with themselves and with their friends that forms the background for the character development.
i love books.
therefore i really liked the ending.
i hope things like this occurred in East Germany, and continue to occur in all those places in the world that are not free to speak their minds and think their own thoughts, in private, and to speak them in public.
thanks to the movie for a thrilling and thought provoking ride.
 fine drama despite a gaping hole in the screenplay August 25, 2007
Roland E. Zwick (Valencia, Ca USA)
26 out of 33 found this review helpful
*possible spoilers*
It seems somehow appropriate that "The Lives of Others" should be set in 1984, since it takes us to a world where George Orwell's fictional Big Brother has become an all-too-real fact of everyday life. The place is East Germany, five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, where not just every action but virtually every thought can be surveyed and monitored by the secret police agency known as STASI. As self-appointed "voices of the people," artists suffer an even more intense level of scrutiny than the average, everyday citizen. As a result, many of them have either fled the country, committed suicide, or compromised their artistic vision in exchange for security and safety. Georg Dreyman, a successful writer and dramatist, has chosen the latter course of action, towing the party line in his works better than most of his fellow artists. Nevertheless, Wiesler, a security agent with STASI, suspects that Dreyman may not be quite the ideological purist Wiesler's fellow officers believe him to be (Wiesler may also be motivated by the fact that he is attracted to Dreyman`s beautiful girlfriend, a well-known stage actress named Christa-Marie Sieland, and, thus, has reasons of his own for wanting Dreyman out of the picture). To confirm his suspicions, Wiesler has Dreyman's apartment bugged so that he and Sieland can be kept under surveillance twenty-four hours a day. After awhile, however, Wiesler begins to soften in his stance towards Dreyman and, before long, he is betraying his own vows to the state by whitewashing his official reports on the writer.
Within this historical context, "The Lives of Others" provides a chilling portrait of what life is like under a totalitarian regime. It shows the dehumanization that occurs when freedom of thought and expression become anathema to a society, and the untenable paranoia that develops when one must live in constant fear of betrayal from stranger, acquaintance and loved-one alike.
Interestingly, the two main characters in the film share very little screen time together, yet they are intricately linked in their roles of the observer and the observed. Dreyman is a man willing to go along with a system he knows to be wrong, partly out of fear, but partly too out of a sincere belief that nothing he can do, even as an artist, will ever really change things. It isn't until a close friend of his, a "blacklisted" theater director, decides to take his own life rather than to live with the oppression that Dreyman wakes up from his lethargy and takes a proactive stance against injustice.
Wiesler has a less clearly defined moment of epiphany, and this strikes me as being one of the very few weaknesses of this otherwise extraordinarily fine film. If Wiesler has a literary antecedent, it would have to be Guy Montag, the fire-starting protagonist in Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451." Like Montag, Wiesler is a gung-ho advocate of a regressive regime, eagerly performing his duty of stamping out what he believes to be seditious and subversive elements that threaten the stability of the society. But whereas Montag has his unmistakably paradigm-shifting moment while reading "David Copperfield," Wiesler has no comparable event to explain his 180-degree turnabout in outlook. He just suddenly goes from being Dreyman's bitterest antagonist to his greatest protector and champion without a whole lot of explanatory detail to go along with the change. It's difficult for us to accept the fact that a man would suddenly turn his back on everything he's dedicated his life to without at least a vaguely articulated reason for doing so.
As Wiesler, the late great actor, Ulrich Muhe, leaves an indelible mark in his portrayal of a man whose cold, emotionless surface may be more the product of his environment than a reflection of the true man at the core of his being. In a largely nonverbal role, Muhe is forced to convey much of his character's thoughts, feelings and emotions through his piercing eyes and tightly pursed lips. Sebastian Koch brings a remarkable subtlety to the role of the writer, while Martina Gedeck as his girlfriend, and Ulrich Tukur as Wiesler's hardnosed superior deliver excellent performances as well.
In her filmmaking debut, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck brings both a stunning attention to detail and a strong sense of atmosphere to her work. Given the repressive environment she is portraying, Donnersmarck wisely holds back on delivering grand sentimental gestures for most of the film - which makes the climactic moments all the more heart-wrenching and devastating when they finally arrive.
In this age of ramped-up fear and paranoia - and the increased scrutiny and surveillance that come along with them - "The Lives of Others" serves as a stark reminder of the things we lose when we give up our freedoms.
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