Review: Goodbye, Lenin! (2003)
Review of Wolfgang Becker's 2003 Personal and Political Comedy
Apr 22, 2009
East vs West. Communism vs Capitalism. Left vs Right. Personal vs Political. All are struggles at the heart of Wolfgang Becker's Goodbye, Lenin!, a 2003 film starring Daniel Bruhl and Katrin Sass.
Goodbye Lenin! Synopsis
After her husband flees across the iron curtain into the arms of a West German woman, Christiane Kerner (Sass) is forced to raise two children on her own in communist East Germany, instilling them with a love of socialism and a healthy disrespect for authority. Flash forward ten years to the fortieth anniversary celebration of the DDR and Chistiane’s son, Alex (Bruhl), has abandoned all dreams of being an astronaut and is working in a state-operated television repair shop. Unbeknownst to all, the world is literally about to fall apart around them.
On her way to a state dinner, Christiane see’s Alex participating in an anti-Wall demonstration, causing her to suffer a heart attack and enter a coma. After a tumultuous eight months in 1989, Christiane awakes with the doctor telling Alex that any shock could see her suffer a relapse, triggering a series of (mis)adventures as the family attempt to hide the crumbling facade of East Germany from Christiane, as the nation prepares for reunification and celebrates the triumph of West Germany in the 1990 Football World Cup.
A Gentle Tale, But Not Always Successful
Setting such a personal story in the most monumental of times will always prove difficult to pull off effectively. And although Goodbye, Lenin! triumphs in some regards, it eventually falls flat, let down by its own vices and failing to deliver on its promise of a unique and heart-warming tale of unconditional love and loving betrayal.
Among the reasons for its failure are the rather wide cracks that appear in the plot structure and delivery throughout. For instance, the childhood back story seems to be a veiled attempt to show the utopic East Germany of the siblings’ youth, however the use of an absent father as a narrative device is fairly clumsy and even when he is re-introduced towards the end of the film, his effect on the characters is remarkably minimal.
Similarly, the contrived nature of the script is highlighted by the consistently ‘poetic’ and ‘ironic’ voice overs supplied by the Alex character. In fact, the ‘clever’ dialogue hits a bum note throughout, with director and co-writer Wolfgang Becker coming across every bit like a fifty-something man trying to sound young and hip. By way of example, Alex refers to the march against the Berlin Wall as “several hundred people got together for some evening exercise” and noted that his mother “slept through the classical concert in front of West Berlin’s city hall and through the start of a huge and unique recycling campaign”, referring, of course, to the destruction of the Berlin Wall.
Creating 'Alternative Truths'
This process of ambiguation is manifested in Alex’s continued attempts to hide the outside world from his mother, and it is these sections of the film that prove to be the most successful and the most engaging. Particularly great are the reconstructed news programs created by Alex and his new West German workmate, an aspiring filmmaker. The pair deftly manipulate file and news footage in their attempts to hoodwink Christiane and maintain the conceit that the Wall never fell and the DDR still exists.
Goodbye, Lenin! is perhaps most interesting in its exploration of our ability to rewrite history and create ‘alternative truths’. History, we are told, is always written by the winners, yet Alex is attempting to re-write this history from an East German perspective in order to satiate his mothers desire to see the DDR succeed.
Yet Goodbye, Lenin! also serves as a reflection of the creation of personal histories and the manipulation of personal realities. Alex’s fabrication of truth and the act of ‘keeping up appearances’, reflects Roberto Begnini’s Life is Beautiful (1997), in which a father attempts to shield his son from the horrors of a WWII concentration camp by pretending it is simply a game.
Tempered Praise
Noble in its attempts, Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin! does have a tendency to wallow in its knowingly 'cool' demeanor, suffering from a sometimes messy, jumbled script and an apparent lack of focus. It should be praised, however for its playful portrayal of a family’s personal struggle to come to terms with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, and its attempt to show up 'history' as little more than a personal or political treatment of the past.
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