Locations/Showings
Featuring Mainstream &
Art House Choices

Forum
Scary Movie 3 was neither scary nor a movie. Discuss this & more.

Reviews
Glorifications & Executions of the latest Movies, DVDs, and television shows.

Flashback Flicks
Krull and other "Lost" Classics get their day in the sun.

Crapmasterpieces
So darn crappy they're hilariously brilliant.

TV Highlights
Boob Tube Playtime!

Calendar
A movie/tv related calendar. Covers openings, DVD release dates, conventions etc.

Goodbye, Lenin!

Starring: Daniel Brühl, Katrin Saß, Chulpan Khamatova, Maria Simon, Florian Lukas, Alexander Beyer, Burghart Klaußner

Director: Wolfgang Becker

Reviewed by P Joshua Laskey

Director Wolfgang Becker has composed an elegy to Socialism in his Goodbye, Lenin! Expecting a sidesplitting comedy based on previews, I was quite taken aback to find so unassuming and category-defying a film. The basic premise is simple enough: an East German woman falls into a coma in October 1989, and having missed the fall of the Berlin Wall, must be kept from the fact of the fall of Communism. Becker’s execution is also
simple enough: his story follows that main thread with a few surprises that smack the characters much harder than they did me. But somehow, Becker has woven such simplicity together in such a way as to achieve something a bit more mystifying than first meets the eye or ear.

The first thing I noticed about the film was the classical score betraying the sentimental undertones even beneath the funnier scenes. Always there were instruments playing serious though not somber notes, and by laying them beneath the visual elements of his movie, Becker was able to achieve an intriguing abiguity and counterpoint. A coma is not funny, the music seemed gently to reiterate throughout. But classic comedy always has some unfunny truth underlying the laughlines.

The second thing I noticed was the overarching simplicity of everything. East German Socialism seems to bore the imagination with drabness and uniformity, and Becker did not less with depicting a German Democratic Republic (the official name of East Germany) from his own imagination. The story plodded along predictably with mishaps both
beyond and within the characters’ control. The shots never sped up nor slowed down
significantly enough to merit notice. The music never swelled, and the actors never gave into melodramatic hysterics. But somehow I was never disconnected from the story. I wanted to know if the whole thing would go off.

What impressed me by the end was how many topics Becker actually tackled throughout the course of so seemingly simple a story not be complicating matters but by maintaining a stict faith in simplicity. Goodbye, Lenin! touched on how a litte white lie can tumble downhill
into a snowball of deceit, and I wonder if that is not a comment on Socialism itself. By tying the comatose woman to the Socialist state (whether I overthought the metaphor is a topic for another time), Becker managed to sanctify, in some ways, the motherly intentions of a system bent on “improving” the lives of its citizens, and, thus, he evoked a strange nostalgia for a self-acknowledgedly idealized and imagined versioin of the past.

Then there was the grandest theme of all: reunification. People throughout this story longed to come together, to remake the past, to rectify old harms, and eventually they did. If the woman stood in for East Germany, then her son stood in for us. Whether we understand each other or not, we are better off taking care of those we love, Becker seems to say. And love, not understanding, breeds unity. I give Goodbye, Lenin! three and a half stars because it never waivered from its simple origins and because it was a beautiful ode to reunion.

Rating:

(3 1/2 out of 4 stars)