best film of the year

Since overcoming the furious seriousness of my youth, I have enjoyed taking the mantle of the æsthete in all matters of culture. In my assumption of the persona, that has meant elevating style over content and surface over depth. Consquently, I often say things like, 'Content is nothing; style is everything'. While I do earnestly think that such a belief offers benefits to humanity like safety and a guiltless love of beauty, I can also recognize my susceptibility to the pull of Wildean epigram in saying such things. ('There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.' Oscar Wilde, preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray.)

But then a great book or film or play of deep moral and political commitment comes along and all my dandyism and foppishness fall by the wayside. Commitment, of course, is not enough. It takes a work of great æsthetic achievement as well to avoid the pitfalls of easy didacticism and dull morals. I saw such a film last night and, while I recognize the risks inherent in immediately calling it the best film of the year, I'm going to run with it (and, yes, today is the Oscar deadline). It was, in short, a national epic for an age that history has taught to be anti-epic.

What is a national epic? Usually, it's a myth or a lie, a substitution of easy narcissism—if not supremacism—for the mess of history. The Nazis, the Soviets, the Serbs, and the Afrikaners all made deep investments in epic in the twentieth century, but only their crimes make them any different than all the other epic-hungry nations of the world. In a best-case scenario, national epics are what nations tell themselves so they can live with what they've done and forget it.

Salman Rushdie's great accomplishment in Midnight's Children was to write a national counter-epic. The novel comprehends the sweep of twentieth-century Indian history while constantly questioning narrative's ability to do so—'Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems'—and acknowledging its protagonist's need to 're-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role'. (chapter 12) Instead of a tale of heroism, the novel offers a narrative about narrativization told by a schlemiel with a big nose. Its sprawling form demonstrates that the only healthy version of history is the mixed-up kind that the novel calls in its final chapter 'the chutnification of history'. The great Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien used a different post-epic approach in his trilogy (City of Sadness; The Puppetmaster; Good Men, Good Women) by formally showing the limits of cinema's ability to comprehend history and experience. Through his use of open framing, the characters fall out of the frame; the film literally cannot contain them.

All of which brings me to the best film of the year: Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others), directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck of Germany. The film, set in East Germany in 1984, takes us inside the Stasi and its surveillance of a risk-averse playwright whose actress-girlfriend the Stasi chief minister covets. The agency entrusts the operation to a true believer, a man so zealous in defense of his craft that he teaches interrogation at the Stasi academy. (Because the film is still out, I will avoid spoilers, but it kills me to have to do so.)

I had heard that the film was about Stasi surveillance, but I was surprised that it asks us to identify with the zealous agent Wiesler, played with supreme control by Ulrich Mühe. If Forest Whitaker finds subtlety in exuberance in The Last King of Scotland, Mühe finds exuberance in subtlety. Like Almodóvar's Hable con ella, the film begins with the characters attending a performance, but agent Wiesler is no Almdovóran hero moved to tears by art. No, he will spend the performance staring at his target through binoculars. But what of the power of art to transform us? Does anyone still believe in such things? (Reader, I struggle, for your benefit, with the need to avoid spoilers.)

Filmically, we're treated to a masterful display of the cinematography of surveillance and the color palette of Erich Honecker's DDR. Can this really be the director-screenwriter's first feature? The style of this film is as subtle and controlled as Mühe's performance. The rest of the cast is first-rate as well. Sebastian Koch embodies the cool, the quiet sexiness, and the humanism we fancifully attribute to men of the arts. Martina Gedeck burns as the desperate, self-doubting actress. Ulrich Tukur and Thomas Thieme are perfect as the badly dressed Stasi higher-ups. If they look like that in real life, they both need makeovers.

The film rises to the level of epic—and no, not counter-epic or 'epic' in quotes—by telling Germans the story of themselves. It's not a story of heroes and triumphs and easy moralizing. It's a story of truth. It hurts to watch it. If its classification as epic needs qualification, then let us call it an epic that hurts. The film shows us everything: the insane closed logic of the zealots of order, the depradations they exact on the innocent and the confused, the compromises of spirit that such an order requires for survival, and the tragic fate of those who cannot weather such impossible compromises.

We can only hope that when the long Bush-Cheney nightmare is over, we can have as thorough and uncompromising a truth-telling about how Americans sat by while the Supreme Court sanctioned a coup, towers fell while terrorism warnings were ignored, people who needed our help in Afghanistan were abandoned for war elsewhere, intellectuals paraded their support for torture on television, the rule of law was suspended, and our countrymen returned the culprits to power. But perhaps epic would not be the appropriate genre. No, the only genre suited to our late history would be tragedy.