Downfall received criticism in its native Germany for seeking to “humanise” Hitler, as if to try and explain the horrors of the Nazi regime were somehow to explain them away. Yet the tactics employed by writer Bernd Eichinger and director Oliver Hirschbiegel are sound. The film has to describe the loyalty Hitler inspired in his staff – for Hitler the man, rather than Hitler the monster - before it can dramatise the inevitable desertion.
Spring 1945, a bunker beneath a Berlin besieged by Russian forces, and from cold-eyed ideologue Goebbels (Ulrich Matthes) to a manic depressive Eva Braun (Juliane Kohler), the gang is very much all here. Hitler (a superlative Bruno Ganz) had by this point reached his all-or-nothing phase, fluctuating between absolute resignation and wheedling around, somewhat pathetically, in search of some way back.
Playing one of history’s great over-actors, Ganz nails Hitler’s voice, his tendency for splenetic eruptions, with remarkable precision. This Hitler is chillingly sober when it comes to discussing his anti-Semitic legacy, but prone to childlike outbursts (“It is my Will!”) whenever he can’t get his own way. Ganz’s interpretation of the Fuhrer’s body language - forever struggling to keep shaking hands under control, just one more domain slipping away from him - is so compelling in itself you might well be distracted from the subtitles.
Between them, Hirschbiegel and Eichinger display a powerhouse combination: the sense of broader historical events coupled with an eye for the telling anecdote. As in his previous Das Experiment, Hirschbiegel’s trick is to lock the viewer in primarily the one location with the only certainty that things are going to get much worse. It is, as one might expect, a long and serious-minded film. Yet the result is rarely less than fascinating: a two-and-a-half hour redefinition of the term “bunker mentality”.
Controversial and award-winning German drama about the final days of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. Bruno Ganz plays the German dictator who, as the Russians close in towards Berlin, retreats to his bunker with his fiancee Eva Braun, his private secretary Traudle Junge, and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. His mood ranging from violent rage to pessimistic defeat, Hitler attempts to deny the inevitable as the other occupants of the bunker deal with the prospect of their impending death at the hands of the Russians. Goebbels kills his family before committing suicide, while Hitler finally marries Eva Braun in a ceremony that precedes their own suicide by hours. With only Junge surviving, the Red Army closes in and takes the capital.
Given the British people's continued fascination with the Third Reich and virtually everything to do with the rise and fall of the Nazis it is tempting to ask whether ... more >
Given the British people's continued fascination with the Third Reich and virtually everything to do with the rise and fall of the Nazis it is tempting to ask whether a film like 'Downfall' can tell us anything we don't already know about Hitler's last days.
The short answer is not really. There can't be may people who will not recognise immediately the sinister calm of Joseph Goebells, unrepentant and loyal to the last. Nor will they surprised at the spectacle of his wife, the truly ghastly Magda, still starry-eyed in her admiration of the Fuhrer despite the catastrophe he has brought upon her and the German people. Even the gallows humour of the junior officers has a faint ring of familiarity about it from previous films and TV dramas tackling the same subject.
And yet this superbly constructed movie does manage to offer an experience both thrilling and disturbing that is very different to that of previous depictions of those final days in a Berlin bunker. That experience centres around the exhausted and visbly crumbling leader himself, masterfully portrayed by Bruno Ganz.
Downfall, like no other film before it, fixes its attention on the mindset of the dictator about to be consigned to eternal ignomony. It goes about its task with an assiduous, almost surgical methodology which is unsparing and wholly unforgiving in its approach. And what is revealed is something that has never been fully explored before in quite such detail. It is a kind of hubris or perhaps unseemly egoism that prevents Hitler from acknowleging what he has done.
With his world, Germany's world, crumbling around him we see Hitler flailing around desperately seeking culprits. First he blames his generals for their incompetence, then he is seen raging against his own cabinet ministers for their failure to carry out his commands to the letter. Finally, absurdly, he comes around to blaming the German people. 'The people have failed'. There is not a trace of irony in his voice when he utters these preposterous words. At no point is the Fuhrer prepared to consider his own part in the disaster. At no point can he imagine that it is he who has failed.
Egoism, hubris and monstrous pride brought about by years of the misplaced adoration of millions of German people left a man incapable of anything resembling humility even in abject defeat. < less
