GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 2/08/07)

With his first feature, writer-director von Donnersmarck delivers something extraordinary and rare: a thriller that's entirely adult in both its concerns and perspective which manages to be as thoroughly gripping as any finely tuned albeit adolescent Hollywood nail-biter. And it's historical, too, which makes it good for ya!

But seriously. Lives, which is set in East Germany in the 1980s, touched a still-throbbing nerve when it premiered in the now-unified country last year, in large part because of its thorough and thoroughly wrenching portrayal of the ideology and methodology of Stasi, the East German secret police force whose emphasis on surveillance made life in the Communist-controlled country an Orwellian nightmare. In a way, the story told in Lives is 1984 in reverse. It begins with Captain Gerd Weisler (Muhe, who was himself under Stasi scrutiny during his early years as an actor), a Stasi operative so par excellence he's teaching the hottest young recruits. A true believer in the system, the party, the works, he really loves Big Brother. Then he's enlisted to spy on playwright Georg Dreyman (Koch). Dreyman owes his cozy bourgeois lifestyle to the fact that he toes the party line, so Weisler's not really certain why he's on Dreyman's case. As it happens, it's because a party boss wants to horn in on Dreyman's lover, the beautiful actress Christa-Marie Seeland (Gedeck). Weisler finds himself developing a respect and affection for both Dreyman and Seeland as he learns how rotten to the core his masters are, which leads to a series of unbearably tense feints and confrontations.

All of which are handled by von Donnersmarck with smarts and technical expertise the likes of which one hardly ever sees in a first-time feature-maker. In fact, if I have any complaint about Lives, it's not about the redemptive conclusion that some other critics find difficult to swallow, but that von Donnersmarck is almost too virtuosic in getting us there—the movie wraps up too neatly. But that's a quibble. This is as assured and sweeping as mainstream movies get these days.

—Glenn Kenny