The 50 Greatest Dramas: #28 - The Lives of Others (2006)

The daily realities of tyranny and morality behind the Berlin Wall are intertwined in this brilliant German debut

George Orwell would recognize much in The Lives Of Others, a gripping and distressing vision of life under the jackboot of state repression.

Set in the former East Germany in 1984, its drama takes place under the shadow of the Berlin Wall in a country ruled by the secret police, the Stasi. Debut writer-director Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck crafts an intricate tale about other people's lives as State Security Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is ordered to monitor one of the country's top playwrights, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his actress girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). As the watcher and the watched intertwine, The Lives Of Others shows us the way in which the daily realities of tyranny threaten to dehumanize everyone involved.

Having struck a painful nerve in its reunified native land - where it swept the board at the 2006 German Film Awards - The Lives Of Others has been described by many as an antidote to the light-hearted comedy of films like Goodbye Lenin. No cheerful recollection of life as it used to be under the Communists, it's a truly devastating political thriller that invites Germany to grapple with its chequered Cold War past. Adult, intelligent and unwilling to deliver glib answers to the thorny issues of personal morality that it raises, it's a film that slowburns into your consciousness like a cigarette end being stubbed out on your brain. In part, it's a result of several terrific performances that are headlined by Mühe as Wiesler, the cold, dispassionate Stasi officer. A grey man in a grey land of Skodas and grim tower blocks he believes fervently in what he does, an idealist who thinks the secret police are "the Party's sword and shield".



Entering Dreyman's apartment and fitting it with bugging devices, Wiesler begins 24/7 surveillance, yet what he overhears leads him to question his calling. As well as being captivated by the lives of Dreyman and his beautiful actress girlfriend, Wiesler begins to realize that he's just a tool in a personal vendetta. It's a gradual epiphany that makes him question the morality of his actions, an inner drama that's brought to life through Von Donnersmarck use of the piano piece 'Sonata For A Good Man'. What, the film asks, is a good man? A patriot who follows orders? Or someone who risks everything to show compassion to others?

Mühe's placid performance hides great depths. His character is an insipid man who discovers a great passion and acts to preserve it. Fascinatingly, the actor himself had first-hand experience of Stasi surveillance. After the Wall came down and the secret police files were opened to the public, he discovered that Stasi records indicated his ex-wife had been informing on him (an accusation she denies).

It's an anecdote that's instructive of just how portentous this film is in the history of German cinema; The Lives Of Others is one of the first fictional movies since the fall of the Wall to truly capture the cruelty and sadism of life as it was back in the GDR. It's a powerful piece of cinema that demands to be grappled with, if only so that we can also see how the lives of others affect us too.

Verdict
A stunning debut about the daily reality of tyranny that will strike a chord far beyond its native Germany.

The 50 Greatest Dramas: #29 - Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

In Guillermo Del Toro's Oscar-winning fairytale for adults, fascism struggles to trample an innocent's imagination

In the imagination of filmmakers, there is something about the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and its immediate aftermath that lends itself to the innocent, often fanciful perspective of a child. So Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) presented an idyllic Spanish postwar countryside through the eyes of a girl obsessed with James Whale's Frankenstein, and Guillermo Del Toro's The Devil's Backbone (2001) seamlessly merged the inexorable advance of fascism with a ghost story unfolding in a rural school for boys.

Pan's Labyrinth is a sister film to The Devil's Backbone, and similarly blends historical realism with more genre-bound fantasy elements to create an expansive, visionary and moving examination of Spain's darkest chapter of the last century.

It is 1944, at the end of the Civil War, a time when idealism and innocence are taking their final, doomed stand. With her father dead, bookish young Ofélia (Ivana Baquero) is brought to the country outpost of her pregnant mother's new man, the fascist Captain Vidal (Sergi López), who is ruthlessly engaged in rooting out the last remnants of a ragtag guerrilla group hidden in the neighbouring woods.



Vidal's head housekeeper (Maribel Verdú) and doctor (Álex Angulo) are both secretly helping the resistance as best they can, and Ofélia too defies Vidal's monolithic worldview by retreating into her own fairytale imagination. After following a locust-like fairy into an ancient labyrinth bordering the estate, Ofélia meets the forest spirit Pan (Doug Jones), who sets her three tasks involving a giant greedy toad, the terrifying Pale Man (who devours children and holds his eyes in the palms of his hands), and the shedding of innocent blood. Meanwhile outside, an altogether more real monster awaits, torturing and murdering anyone who stands in his way.

"You'll see that life is not like your fairy tales." So Ofélia is told by her mother Carmen (played by the appropriately named Ariadna Gil), in one of several attempts to wean the young innocent off the high ideals and straightforward morality of her beloved fiction, where bravery and purity are rewarded with living happily ever after. Carmen has, after all, allowed herself to become inextricably compromised, marrying her own and her children's fates to the rise of fascism. Yet in Pan's Labyrinth, the world of Ofélia's imagination and the realities of Falangist Spain run in curious parallel as two different, ideologically opposed ways of telling the same story - a story of tyranny, resistance and the timeless struggle between good and evil.



Ofélia's trials may be fanciful, but the woodland strife, mythical beasts, heroic acts, purloined keys, forbidden feasts and troubled births that constitute their essential furniture all reflect, through a glass darkly, the actual conflicts taking place around her, while the deadly reality of the dangers faced by the girl and others is never in any doubt. The result is a Franco-era Brazil, where events outside and inside the mind gradually become indistinguishable as each allegorises and informs the other, so that the ending can be regarded as both horrifically tragic and redemptively triumphant at the same time - all depending on the limits of the viewer's own imagination.

From Cronos to Mimic to Blade II to Hellboy, Del Toro has always been associated with horror, but even if Pan's Labyrinth has its fair share of grotesquerie, brutality and visceral shocks, it is a film unbounded by genre, all at once children's fantasy, adult parable, historical drama and more, located at a magical crossroads where Labyrinth meets The Shining and Land of Freedom meets Ichi the Killer.

Del Toro and his effects crew have crafted an exquisite fairytale world whose phantasmagorical spectacle is never anything less than integral to the film. The performances are flawless (especially López as the clean-shaven face of horror), the transitions from reality to fantasy and back again are beguiling, and the viewer always has the sense of watching something not just gripping, but also of vital importance.

Verdict
In Pan's Labyrinth, fairytale fantasy and fascist reality vie for the soul of a girl and a nation, in an unmissable celebration of cinema's capacity to enthrall.

The 50 Greatest Dramas: #30 - On the Waterfront (1954)

Elia Kazan's seminal American classic. Marlon Brando is the dockworker with dreams of being a being a prizefighter who fights the murderous corruption of the New York docks

Kazan at the height of his powers, as yet untraumatized by any involvement with Senator Joe, and free to elucidate the grim imprisonments of life around the Brooklyn docks.

Brando is Terry, the boy who coulda beena contenda, stuck between casual slavery unloading packing cases in the harbour and the dream of being a prizefighter; Eva Marie Saint is Terry's girlfriend, trying to negotiate a way out of their lives; Rod Steiger his sly brother, Karl Malden the priest forced to watch his flock demoralized and dehumanized by the murderous practice of the shipping companies and the union.

The finest scene is not the one in which Brando and Steiger have their taxi-cab altercation about one-way tickets to Palookaville, but a confrontation between the lovers, a breathless, savage, desperate argument that's almost drowned out by the blare of whistles and klaxons from the harbour. Two faces - and what faces! - locked in emotional battle.

The 50 Greatest Dramas: #31 - Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

An orphaned Mumbai slum kid tries to change his life by winning TV's 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?' in Danny Boyle's multi-Oscar-winning fable

Jamal Malik ('Skins' star Dev Patel) is being beaten by Mumbai police for allegedly cheating on hit TV show 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?' One question away from the ultimate 20 million rupee prize, no one, including slick show host Prem (Anil Kapoor), believes a chai wallah (teaboy) like Jamal could know all the answers. As the tough inspector (Irfan Khan) replays Jamal's appearance on the show, it's revealed that each question corresponds to a specific life lesson from Jamal's tragic past.

Raised in abject poverty in Mumbai's grimmest slum along with older brother Salim, then orphaned by a Hindu mob attack, Jamal and Salim are forced to fend for themselves on the streets through opportunistic petty crime. They pick up a young girl, fellow orphan Latika (Freida Pinto), escape the clutches of a vicious Fagin-like crime boss, lose Latika, and continue their picaresque adventures, one step ahead of the law. As adolescents, however, Salim becomes entranced by a life of crime and Latika's unexpected return sets brother against brother. Will Jamal salvage his girl, his fortune and his life on 'Millionaire'?



Adapted by Full Monty writer Simon Beaufoy from Vikas Swarup's hit novel 'Q&A', Slumdog is an underdog tale. Beaufoy's Oscar-winning screenplay scampers after Swarup's self-consciously Dickensian storytelling tradition, and is even built around the 'Millionaire' show, as iconic a symbol of Western capitalist entertainment as exists.

Director Danny Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, both of whom also won Oscars, evidently immersed themselves in India's sensory overload. The film revels in the sub-continent's chaotic beauty and raging colours, from Mumbai shantytowns to Agra's regal Taj Mahal. The thrillingly off-the-cuff digital imagery reflects a nation in a state of explosive flux, looming skyscrapers erupting from wasteland, slum kids turning into overnight millionaires through the kiss of television. The film's uniquely vibrant, headlong 21st century rush is that of the infinite possibilities of modern India itself.

Slumdog's such a crowd-pleaser that some critics might brand it Boyle's best since Trainspotting. It even echoes a couple of that film's classic set pieces, notably a slum chase reminiscent of Renton and Co's opening Edinburgh dash and a lavatorial incident so stomach-churning (yet hilarious), it makes Trainspotting's infamous toilet scene seem like Ewan McGregor took an Evian bath.



In fact, the likable Boyle has been on great form for some time - 28 Days Later - revamped the zombie movie, Millions is perhaps the best kids film of recent years. No other current British director makes such thrillingly current (all his films are set in either the present or future), kinetic, inherently visual films and proper recognition is long overdue - though, true to form, he's insistent here on crediting co-director Loveleen Tandan, whose major contribution seems to have been unearthing the wonderfully naturalistic kids to play Jamal, Salim and Latika.

Verdict
A spirited underdog fable marinated in modern India's melting pot. Danny Boyle's still the master of spices.

The 50 Greatest Dramas: #32 - The Wrestler (2008)

An ageing wrestler struggles to leave the spotlight in Darren Aronofsky's award-winning drama. Mickey Rourke revels in the role of a lifetime

First things first, let's deal with the misleading publicity about The Wrestler being Mickey Rourke's first film for 15 years. Anyone with even a passing interest in film will know that the man with the interesting face has been pretty busy in recent times, fronting Sin City in 2005 and providing excellent support in Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003) and Animal Factory (2000).

What is fair to say is that even roles as strong as these are beneath a man who burst on the scene like a modern-day Brando. With his fine looks, shy manner and soft voice, it's perhaps more accurate to say Rourke initially resembled the young Al Pacino. And for a while, it seemed inevitable that the charismatic star Diner and Rumble Fish would play roles of the calibre of Michael Corleone.

No sooner had the - frankly shocking - 9 1/2 Weeks (1986) made him a bona fide A-lister than the wheels came off for Philip Andre Rourke Jr. At the height of his fame, he returned to his "first love" boxing. In 1989 he made a soft porn flick, Wild Orchid, and married the leading lady Carre Otis. He made a big deal about donating money to the IRA. And then he cut off his little finger to impress his estranged wife. He also developed a thing for Chihuahuas which inadvertently led to his walking off the film Luck Of The Draw, a bizarre move that did little to repair his already tarnished reputation.

Unhirable and undesirable, Mickey Rourke during his lost years has a lot in common with his character Randy 'The Ram' Robinson. The biggest name in pro wrestling 20-odd years ago, the man born Robin Razminsky now finds himself working in front of dozens rather than thousands of fans. And when he's not playing the wrestling equivalent of pub gigs, he's eking out just enough of a living shifting boxes at a supermarket that he can afford the upkeep on the sort of rundown trailer usually encountered on episodes of 'Cops'.

Divorced from his wife, estranged from his daughter (Evan Rachel Wood), and with the closest thing to a companion being Marisa Tomei's single-mum stripper, Randy seems out for the count. But then two things happen. First a promoter suggests restaging the greatest bout of Robinson's career against arch rival The Ayatollah (real-life wrestler and former karate champion Ernest Miller). Then 'The Ram' suffers a heart attack. If anything ought to spell the end of his career, it's a myocardial infarction. But will the lure of one last day in the spotlight prove too great for the former champ?



Watching The Wrestler, it's clear that i) Darren Aronofsky has done his research, and ii) part of this research involved watching Beyond the Mat until it had burned onto his retinas. Indeed, it's tempting to see Randy Robinson as a composite of the three remarkable "workers" profiled in Barry Blaustein's excellent documentary: Terry Funk, the veteran unable to leave the spotlight even though his body is telling him to do so; Mick Foley, the intelligent family man who'll do anything to 'pop' a crowd even if it does upset his loved ones, and Jake 'The Snake' Roberts, the former WWE star ruined by drug abuse and estranged from his daughter.

The air of realism that percolates through the picture is further enhanced by the presence of top ring warriors such as Ernest Miller, Ron Killings (currently working for the WWE as R-Truth) and Brian Rollins, aka The Blue Meanie. The pick of the real workers, though, is Dylan Summers, a soft-spoken, shaggy-haired man otherwise known as Necro Butcher. For years Summers has toured America, slamming opponents through burning tables and broken glass and allowing himself to be set about with everything including the kitchen sink. In The Wrestler, Summers works a hardcore match with 'The Ram' that's so vicious, it might even shock die-hard fans. As for those for whom wrestling means two fat blokes gut-barging one another around a leisure centre in Kettering, you might want to avert your eyes during these more excessive moments.

It's during The Wrestler's bloodiest set-piece that you can easily forget that this isn't just a film about guys in tights fake-beating one another up, but the story of a man trying to find honour and acceptance in a world bent on grinding him down. As such, the film has a lot in common with dramas like Half Nelson and Aronofsky's own Requiem for a Dream. Every bit as good as his breakthrough film at documenting the struggle for survival and nobility, it's hard to understand why the director has long seemed so keen to swap the kitchen sink for elaborate sci-fi fantasy. Mundanity, grime, thwarted ambition - this is where Aronofsky is most at home.



If Aronofsky seems as bent on self-destruction as Randy Robinson, his cast come on like people desperately trying to seize a long-awaited opportunity. Ever since winning an Oscar for My Cousin Vinny, Marisa Tomei has been more at sea than Captain Ahab. Now given a role worthy of her talent, the star of garbage like The Guru delivers a performance almost as eye-catching as Rourke's tour de force - in other years she might have won as many awards as Rourke. It's long been said that strippers and wrestlers have a lot in common, and to see Tomei's Cassidy losing out on lapdances to her younger colleagues is to remember that she too is a fantasist fighting a losing battle with time.

Whatever Aronofsky, Tomei and Rachel Evan Wood might bring to the picture, The Wrestler belongs to Mickey Rourke. With his puffy face, shattered hands and dead eyes, there's something sad about saying the actor is ideally cast as Randy Robinson. In the end, it's not the physical degeneration that accounts for the quality of his performance. Just check out the scene where 'The Ram' is asked to work on the supermarket deli counter. As he makes his way through the back of the building towards the shop floor, we hear the roar of an expectant crowd. Randy Robinson is heading into the arena again, only this time his audience is an old lady who wants some potato salad and a guy who's really particular about how his ham is sliced. Ignominy, defiance, shame, showmanship - Rourke displays all these qualities during the sequence, sometimes even when he has his back to the camera. The way Rourke plays it, this is a scene about a great actor reminding us that he's returned from the back of beyond.

Verdict
Aronofsky has pulled off that rare feat - he's made a great film about a niche subject that will delight wrestling fans and cineastes alike. And Rourke's Oscar-nominated performance is a knockout.

The 50 Greatest Dramas: #33 - Persona (1966)

Ingmar Bergman's haunting masterpiece explores the gulf of communication that exists between a nurse and her silent patient

A claustrophobic drama with only four characters and only two sets, Persona is a stunning example of cinematic innovation. Charting the neurotic relationship between a nurse and her mute patient, Ingmar Bergman's multi-faceted film is at once a psychological drama, a philosophical meditation on the gap between art and reality, and a curious love story.

After forgetting her lines in the middle of a performance, theatre actress Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullman) retreats from the world, refusing to speak to anyone and becoming a patient at a Swedish sanatorium. With the help of a young nurse (Bibi Andersson), she takes a holiday cottage on the coast in order to recuperate, but their intense, brooding interaction leads only towards madness and despair. A film of flayed nerves and unspoken anxieties, Persona offers a distressing portrait of emotional and spiritual desolation from which Bergman's claustrophobic camera offers no hope of escape. Eschewing establishing shots in favour of a series of striking compositions in which the two lead actresses are forced to share a limited amount of screen space, Bergman tries to make the ever-increasing insanity of his protagonists affect the audience as well. Disorienting us with jump cuts and self-reflexive moments (a shot of a projector, a camera crew and - in a startling sequence - a sequence where the film literally collapses, burning a hole in the negative) this is an unsettling piece of cinema.



The characters' angst-ridden experience of what one calls "the hopeless dream of being" coupled with Bergman's transgression of the conventions of film production create a haunting nightmare of madness and despair. As much a response to the political insanity of the mid-1960s (a television set shows Vietnamese monks immolating themselves) as a film about nervous breakdowns, Persona is a rich, allegorical work that rewards repeated viewings.

Verdict
One of Bergman's most important films, Persona creates a terrifying world in which filmmaking becomes bound up with insanity, anxiety and a crushing sense of angst

The 50 Greatest Dramas: #34 - The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

The true story of the superhuman efforts of Allied POWs, who amid inhuman conditions must build a bridge to aid the Japanese war effort - but what comes first, the bridge or Allied interests?

Director David Lean made his name with smaller, more intimate movies like Brief Encounter and Oliver Twist, but by the time of The Bridge On The River Kwai his epic cinema output was in full swing. The story takes place in 1943, in a POW camp in Burma, where the Japanese are building a railway line between Malaysia and Rangoon. Or, rather, where British Army prisoners are building it, amid conditions of utter brutality and slavery.

For Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) the broad canvas of the war narrows to this particular task - and he and his men pour their energy into it as a means of maintaining their discipline, but also holding on to their marbles. The question is, how far will Nicholson go to protect his bridge, which stands as a symbol of British military efficiency and excellence, even as it makes a vital contribution to the Japanese war effort? In the meantime, the Japanese camp commandant Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) is privately humiliated by his captives' superior engineering skills: the British are building a better bridge than the Japanese Army could - ironically thanks to the extra efforts of the British officer in charge. But further irony - there's an Allied plan to blow it up, which poses a terrible dilemma for Nicholson: will he expose the sabotage and save the bridge, or see it destroyed? As a soldier, the choice is clear, but incredibly he seems ready to ignore his duty to Allied interests.



Whether this is really a film about the complex reality of war, or a melodramatic scenario tacked on to real events is a moot point, but Nicholson's dilemma certainly makes for compelling, spectacular cinema. And Guinness and Hayakawa are excellent as the Japanese and British colonels at odds with each other, but united in their goal of completing the bridge. It's the ironic complexities of the story, together with Lean's trademark epic visual style that places The Bridge On The River Kwai among the best British war films.

Verdict
Guinness, Lean and British war cinema have never been better.