Downfall
review by Peter T. Chattaway | posted 2/18/2005
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Movies have taught us to see the world as a contest between heroes and villains. We like our good guys good, and our bad guys bad. So when filmmakers talk about making a movie that explores the humanity of someone like Adolf Hitler, people get nervous. Even if we suppose that Hitler, for all his crimes, was not quite the worst dictator in the world—he lasted only a dozen years, and the innocents who died under his regime may be outnumbered by the victims of, say, Stalin and Mao—we still want him to be the embodiment of pure evil. So we worry that making him more human will make him more sympathetic, and that sympathy for the man will create sympathy for his toxic ideas.
But in the case of Downfall, at least, nothing could be further from the truth. Several films about Hitler have been made in the English language, starring the likes of Alec Guinness and Anthony Hopkins, but Downfall is the first in decades to be made in Germany itself. And it is precisely because Hitler and his associates are shown in all their emotional complexity that we realize just how monstrous and dehumanizing their thoughts and deeds were.
Swiss actor Bruno Ganz is chilling in the role of Hitler
The film is written by Bernd Eichinger, an occasional screenwriter who has had much more experience as a producer on everything from The Name of the Rose to the Resident Evil flicks (we won't hold those latter examples against him), and it is directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, whose last film to cross the Atlantic, Das Experiment, was a positively visceral fictionalization of the Stanford prison experiments. Evidently Hirschbiegel thrives on claustrophobic environments, in which the shaky semblance of order threatens to erupt into sheer anarchy; most of Downfall takes place in bunkers in Berlin, and while Russian artillery pounds the city, Hitler wavers between dreams of fighting back and a sad acceptance of his fate, with occasional bouts of furious yelling at the officers he feels have betrayed him.
Hitler is played by Bruno Ganz, recently seen in the remake of The Manchurian Candidate but may be best known as one of the angels in Wings of Desire. Despite his ravings about the evils of compassion, Ganz's Fuhrer is capable of moments of softness and tenderness, especially where his mistress, Eva Braun (Nowhere in Africa's Juliane Köhler), and his secretary, Traudl Junge (The Tunnel's Alexandra Maria Lara), are concerned. He is also capable of extreme callousness, even toward his fellow Germans as a whole. Despite all his rhetoric about the Fatherland, Hitler has little use for its sons and daughters; he proclaims that they deserve to suffer because they have proved to be too weak.
Eva Braun (Juliane Kohler) and Hitler (Ganz) take their wedding vows
Thus, he makes no effort to evacuate the city. And thus, those soldiers and civilians who are exposed to the assault aboveground run about shooting and lynching each other, engaging in various forms of debauchery, or arguing over whether there is any point in fighting back. As seen here, Nazi Germany is more than a totalitarian state; it is a personality cult and a religion devoted to a nationalist idea, and now that that idea is dying and the person at the heart of it is losing his grip—both metaphorically and literally, as evidenced by the shaking hand, a possible sign of Parkinson's disease, that Hitler keeps hidden behind his back—those who once believed in his vision act like the apocalypse itself has arrived.
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