Thumbs down

Ballyhooed film critic Roger Ebert's review of "Goodbye, Lenin!" a seminal work of German Ostalgie, leaves much to be desired. More specifically, it reads like the unsophisticated essay of a high school journalism student, writing a review-cum-summary for the school paper.

I can't say I didn't learn anything from Ebert's review, because he does provide a skeletal synopsis of the plot. But beyond that, I also learned that Ebert is wholly unqualified to review this film, at least in the way he attempts.

Admittedly, I may be a bit biased myself in reviewing Ebert's review, both because I've devoted my life to studying Central Europe in the Communist era whereas he clearly doesn't know the first thing about it (beyond the official U.S. version of events), and because I have a keen interest in seeing "Goodbye, Lenin!" (probably also related to my interest in the history of this period). But my own prejudices don't preclude me from criticizing the shoddiness of his review.

Ebert describes the film as a "peculiar" comedy "because it never quite addresses the self-deception which causes Christiane [a protagonist] to support the communist regime in the first place." Of course, this is only peculiar to a dilettante like Ebert, who wonders of the East German regime: "did anyone actually love it and believe in it?"

Hello? Of course they did. Not everyone. Certainly not a lot of people, and very few in the early autumn of 1989, days before the Wall fell. But Ebert can't get that historical moment out of his head, as he admits. He's too shortsighted to comprehend how populations that had suffered terribly through two world wars and horrific, unequaled genocide caused in great measure by the prerogatives of capitalism could somehow embrace a socialist society that promised to transcend that in the name of peace and equality. It's a decidedly Western, "peculiarly" American deficiency.

This is the functional equivalent of a doctrinaire Marxist (or an extreme adherent to some other dogma) looking at the United States and wondering aloud how anyone in America could love their country for its supposed ideals of freedom and democracy since neither have fully panned out in reality. A harsh but instructive juxtaposition, I believe. Especially in light of Ebert's return to this theme of Western righteousness when he references the "wrong-headedness of the heroine." If I penned a critique of some sappy film longing for the good old days of the Cold War consensus and condemned the protagonist for his "manifest idiocy" for embracing the gospel of the free market, the editorial page would be filled for weeks with angry letters from irate viewers lambasting me for besmirching their precious economic system in the name of a "godless communism."

Of course, Ebert probably lost me in the second paragraph, when he misspelled the name of the former East German premier, Erich Honecker, as Eric. (I know, I know, a minor detail, but one that signaled to me early on that Ebert didn't know what he was talking about here.)