This movie starts with an introduction into the German world around the time the Berlin wall falls. Actor Ulrich Mühe, who plays Hauptmann Wiesler, portrays one of the main influences in the film.
The director described the film this way:
The director described the film this way:
“I suddenly had this image in my mind of a person sitting in a depressing room with earphones on his head and listening in to what he supposes is the enemy of the state and the enemy of his ideas, and what he is really hearing is beautiful music that touches him. I sat down and in a couple of hours had written the treatment.”
The point of transformation comes with the music--Beethoven's music that spanned across time to reach Weisler, listening in, and even Dreyman (the writer, or symbolically, the artist, who sits at the piano playing this music).
In the words of the director, Art is powerful.
A review of the movie (HERE) posed the idea that Art is powerful because art possesses TRUTH and BEAUTY--and beauty can transform "Communism and its savagely imposed "truth" within a committed disciple [Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao] into humanity's unending mysteries of love, dignity, and self respect."
Life, as portrayed in an active artistic way in this movie, requires beauty and truth.
These two powers, almost invisible when bogged down by a society that feeds you "truth" constantly, are what truly open the individual up to living life authentically.
Art is a searching, an expression within life's possibilities. Art brings to mind the power of truth and beauty, and how it can change an individual, who can indeed change the world, if even for someone else.
I loved the last line of this movie, "It's for me," when Wiesler finds the Sonata for a Good Man, dedicated to him--the artist (Dreyman) came to realize that it was Wiesler who became the expression of truth and beauty by reaching out to an individual that expressed beauty to him. I can't get past Wiesler's eyes. All throughout the movie, I was sutured by his expressions. His face did not move an inch, except for his eyes, and in the beginning, I kept thinking to myself--he has too beautiful eyes to not have some good in him somewhere. And, it just goes to show that he was a "good man." Why?
Because, he acted with conviction on the truth (thinking for himself instead of buying into store-bought truths). And, his actions created great effects--devastating (with a death) but also beautiful (with restoration and more truth through the reciprocation of his actions through Dreyman's further works).
"How beautiful are the feet that bring good news [truth]." --Isaiah 52.7
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