If I only had a heart

The earnest trudge of The Lives of Others has its moments, but if you don't accept the film's conceit -- that the cold, gray Stasi automaton (well played by Ulrich Mühe) finds a heart by eavesdropping on one of the German Democratic Republic's most well-regarded playwrights/collaborators -- it seems not just improbable, but sentimental. The last is a particularly poignant irony. Writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's debut captures the immobilization of life under totalitarianism with a clarity that honors chroncilers like Robert Conquest, Czeslaw Milosz, and Elie Wiesel. The possibility that anyone can become an object of suspicion, arbitrarily, is essential to totalitarian regimes. Hannah Arendt:

Their regime is not a government in any traditional sense, but a movement, whose advance constantly meets with new obstacles that have to be eliminated. So far as one may speak at all of any legal thinking within a totalitarian system, the "objective opponent" is its central idea.

However, Mühe's performance is such a marvel of brutal efficiency that I couldn't believe that he'd steal a volume of Brecht poems from the playwright's apartment and shed a tear, or confront the playwright's girlfriend -- an actress played by Martina Gedeck -- in a dingy bar with the words, "I'm your audience." As J. Hoberman correctly noted, the ending represents a triumph of an artist's power to retreat from the horrors he's created, dramatic logic be damned.