When I saw the previews of this movie, I rushed out on to Netflix and bumped it up to the top of my list. It arrives and we settle down for what I'm sure will be a thriller, high drama. I mean, look at the plot: it's five years before Glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Captain Gerd Wiesler, a highly skilled East German (GDR) Stasi (secret police) officer, is given a mission: spy on a celebrated writer and his girlfriend to see if they're guilty of ‘thought crime.’ This mission is codenamed Operation Laszlo. The twist is that the writer, Georg Dreyman, isn't really guilty of anything other than having a hot actress girlfriend—the minister of culture initiates this investigation because he wants her for himself.
It goes downhill from there. The movie plods along in leaden jackboots. It's predictable and, considering it's topic, unforgivably trite. The end is typically European: a sad sack of a man shuffles along, essentially. Why's that typically European? It's powerless, defanged, inane. There's no resolution, no satisfaction, no catharsis. This is storytelling for no reason; it barely exists, except in the highly-nuanced, touchy-feely crania of the intelligentsia this is sure to please.
And before anyone accuses me of being incapable of nuance, I'll say sure I am. I am incapable of nuance in this case: it's a fucking drama ferchrissakes! This should be filled with incredible tension and high psychological torture; people's very lives are at stake and we're caught here, in moral limbo, writing a fucking article about suicide statistics in East Germany. This is no time for whimpering philosophizing, do something!
Bah, I should have known.
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