It would be reasonable to expect a film about Bertolt Brecht to be presented in a Brechtian style, but Jan Schütte's The Farewell is more Chekhovian. It takes place over the course of one day toward the end of Brecht's life, as he and a few of his friends, family members, and mistresses vacation by an East German lake. The bucolic setting and years of petty squabbles produce a naturalistic conflict, far removed from Brecht's theories of enforced theatrical artificiality and audience alienation. Josef Bierbichler plays the dying poet-playwright-philosopher as a doughy, unshaven, hacking, semi-senile old crank, appeased only by the sight of lovely young women skinny-dipping in the lake and the vigorous political discussions he has with a dissident friend played by Samuel Fintzi. The year is 1956, and East Germany is undergoing another post-war governmental revamp, in hopes of maintaining a socialist state while reconciling with the West. Bierbichler, meanwhile, can't keep the peace among the women who hover around him, some waiting for him to die so that can receive the copyrights he's promised them over the years. Schütte, working from a screenplay by Klaus Pohl, clearly intends The Farewell to be a distillation of Brecht's life as well as a partly allegorical German history lesson. There's juice there, but the meat of the story is elsewhere. Brecht's life was rich with incident: He achieved international success with musicals like The Threepenny Opera, developed the concept of "epic theater," fled the Nazis and came to America to work in Hollywood, fled Hollywood for East Germany when the HUAC hearings put heat on him, and had many romantic and artistic dalliances along the way. A biography that narrows all that down to one day can't help but feel unsatisfactory, and Schütte's low-budget production is light on scintillating conversation, which makes it all the drearier. As a sketch of the twilight of a great artist, The Farewell has merit, but the sketch would be better used as the background to a mural.