The unexpected wild card in this setup turns out to be Wiesler, an obsessive, emotionally remote hoarder of other people's personal information and a seeming Party automaton; something deep within the agent is stirred by Dreyman and Sieland's intense, precarious commitment to their art and each other. Georg and Christa-Maria have secrets to keep, naturally—she hides a drug addiction, while he writes a scathing, surreptitious eulogy for a fellow artist (Volkmar Kleinert) and arranges to have it published in a West German magazine—and Wiesler, perhaps for the first time, begins to comprehend that satisfying human relationships (and, in this case, Georg's freedom) pivot as much on what isn't revealed as what is. This revelation initially has little effect on Wiesler's own life (accustomed to timing events to the second, he fails to build in postcoital snuggle-time when one of Dreyman and Sieland's lovemaking sessions inspires him to hire a prostitute), but as he goes to ever-greater lengths to protect the couple from themselves and the State, his status as Georg's doppelganger—a dramatist who recklessly works with real lives rather than made-up, controllable ones—takes over and ultimately proves disastrous for everyone involved.
Director-screenwriter Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck strikes an uncommonly graceful balance between his narrative's espionage-thriller accoutrements and love-story sentimentality, and he leavens things throughout with surprising and welcome bursts of wry humor (much of it courtesy of Wiesler's clueless underling, played with slovenly bravado by Charly Hubner). The result coheres into a much warmer, more human and humane exploration of the mechanics of pushing private data into the public realm for personal gain than last year's woeful Hollywood time-waster The Good Shepherd. Cinematographer Hagen Bogdanski's simultaneously isolating and intimate widescreen compositions are a boon, as is Muhe's coiled, heartbreaking turn as the not-quite-hollow Wiesler. It's a remarkably physical performance: Muhe projects the character's true-believer status at the beginning of the film with a bullying stillness that recalls an outsized praying mantis, while by the film's end, when Wiesler is earning his living as a door-to-door junk-mail deliverer, he's hunched and withdrawn, though still unaccountably proud. Too bad there's no Oscar for Best Foreign Language Actor.
Regardless, Wiesler's protracted, hard-earned deterioration brilliantly suggests that a government intent on silencing its critics by negating their inner lives is doomed to an equally spectacular fall, and, over time, a similarly complete irrelevance.