DIRECTOR: Oliver Hirschbiegel
CAST:
Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Juliane Köhler, Corinna Harfouch, Ulrich Matthes,
Thomas Kretschmann, Matthias Habich, Ulrich Noethen, Heino Ferch, Christian Berkel,
Michael Mendl, André Hennicke, Doneven Gunia, Thomas Thieme
REVIEW:
With the exception of the 1955 film Der Letzte Akt (The Last Act), starring Albin Skoda as Hitler, Adolf Hitler has appeared in German cinema only in cameos or from a distance or from behind, never a central character, never occupying a significant chunk of a film's screentime. A major reason for this is the lingering stigma, especially in Germany, surrounding Hitler, and the atrocities his regime committed in Germany's name, but aside from that, Hitler has repeatedly proven himself both one of the most often-played historical figures, and one of the least often convincingly played. There have been many depictions of Hitler over the years by British and American films and actors, including such distinguished names as Sir Derek Jacobi, Sir Anthony Hopkins, and Alec Guinness, to name only a few. And yet even these acclaimed actors had trouble convincing us that they were der Führer. Part of it is the language barrier; no matter how tremendous the performance of the likes of Hopkins might be, Hitler with Hopkins' voice just doesn't quite compute, any more than an actor would be completely convincing as FDR while speaking in German. Perhaps, despite their reluctance, it was up to the Germans to make the first great Hitler movie. Filmmakers Oliver Hirschbiegel and Bernd Eichinger, working from a script based on Joachim Fest's Inside Hitler's Bunker and Traudl Junge's own memoirs, set out to tackle the challenge. The result is a compelling, engrossing, and sometimes genuinely affecting German war drama bolstered by an extraordinary lead performance by Swiss actor Bruno Ganz.
Downfall is bookended with brief snippets of interviews with Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge conducted shortly before her death in 2002, and the film is primarily from Traudl's viewpoint, starting with a prologue in November 1942 in which the young secretary (Alexandra Maria Lara) is appointed to the Führer's headquarters. We next jump ahead to April 1945, with Traudl and the rest of the entourage (an assortment of secretaries, cooks, aids, and top Generals) holed up with Hitler (Bruno Ganz) in his bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, which is now almost surrounded by the Russians who are already overrunning the city's outskirts and pounding the rest into rubble. Many of the Führer's underlings, including Heinrich Himmler (Ulrich Noethen) and Eva Braun's brother-in-law Hermann Fegelein (Thomas Kretschmann) urge him to flee, but Hitler is determined to stay in the besieged capital, still holding out hope for a last-minute turn in the tide, and if that fails, resolving to die by his own hand. Most of his subordinates have already fled, and many of those who remain, including Traudl, are anxious to get out before it's too late, but a small circle of diehard loyalists join Hitler in the bunker, including Eva Braun (Juliane Köhler), the Führer's vacuous mistress, and the Goebbels family, headed by Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels (Ulrich Matthes) and his wife Magda (Corinna Harfouch), both of whom are steadfast in their devotion to Hitler and willing to sacrifice not only themselves, but their own six children. Surrounded by this shrinking inner circle, Hitler himself retreats more and more into a dreamworld, lamenting his unrealized plans for the German people, even as he refuses to evacuate the civilian population from war-torn Berlin, and venting his rage on his cowed Generals when his plans- depending on nonexistent forces- do not materialize. Outside, last-ditch fighting continues, pitting old men and schoolboys armed with bazookas against Russian troops and tanks, among them ten-year-old Hitler Youth Peter Kranz (Doneven Gunia), who has proudly destroyed two Russian tanks and is rewarded with an Iron Cross presented to him by Hitler himself. SS physician Ernst-Günther Schenck (Christian Berkel) resolves to stay in Berlin to do what he can to care for the wounded and the civilians. General Helmuth Weidling (Michael Mendl) is first sentenced to death by Hitler for allegedly moving his command post away from the frontline without permission, and then, when he manages to impress Hitler with his report, is instead appointed to command the final defense of Berlin. When told of his abrupt change in fortune, Weidling caustically remarks that he would have rather faced the firing squad than the impossible task he has just been given. There is also the hard-nosed SS General Wilhelm Mohnke (André Hennicke), a tough, ruthless soldier willing to fight to the end but who firmly disapproves of schoolboys being sent into combat. But the main story is inside the bunker, through the bewildered eyes of young Traudl Junge, as the atmosphere grows increasingly unrealistic and unhinged, until time finally runs out and the Third Reich dies in an orgy of suicide, murder, and devastation.
Downfall brought a great deal of controversy, much but not all of it taking place in Germany, about whether portraying Hitler "as a human being" runs the risk of diminishing the monstrosity of the actions of his regime. I recall when John Cusack's film Max, featuring Hitler (Noah Taylor) as a young man in a friendship with a Jewish artist (Cusack) was accused by one individual of being a "slap in the face" to Holocaust survivors. This same man later admitted that he had not even seen the film, and later retracted his statement after actually watching it. To some people, it seems the only acceptable way to portray Hitler is with him wearing horns on his head, breathing fire, and launching into rabid anti-Semitic tirades whenever he appears onscreen. Well, Hitler did not spend his every waking minute screaming like a maniac. Any Hitler historian can tell you that, and to portray him as such makes him into a joke, a cartoon character impossible to take seriously. That, in my opinion, is considerably more dangerous than portraying him as what he was, like it or not...a human being.
The acting in Downfall is uniformly good, and often excellent, but the show-stealer is the tour de force performance of Bruno Ganz. The acclaimed Swiss actor throws himself into the role with intensity and conviction, and for over two hours, we are able to forget that we are watching an actor playing Hitler, something that no other Hitler portrayer, even one as talented as Anthony Hopkins, quite achieved. Ganz is not a dead-ringer, but he looks the part better than the other "Hitlers" I have seen, and the power and authenticity of his acting never breaks the illusion. Ganz has the voice and the body language down almost perfectly, but that's only part of the reason why he's the most convincing onscreen Hitler. Ganz does what too few other film portrayals of the Führer have done- he presents him as a three-dimensional, albeit loathsome, individual. Ganz shows Hitler as the rambling dreamer detached from reality, and also as a man who can be a considerate, almost fatherly boss to his secretaries, and yet, at regular intervals, a seemingly bottomless pit of tremendous rage and hatred erupts to the surface, making the increasingly impotent despot still an unpredictable and dangerous figure. Some have accused Downfall of depicting Hitler sympathetically. This is simply not true. Bruno Ganz's Hitler doesn't spend all of his screentime throwing frothy rages- although he does have a few of those-, he makes only a brief- but hateful- reference to the Jews, and from the prologue to his final moments he is kind to Traudl Junge. When his architect Albert Speer (Heino Ferch), one of the most trusted members of his inner circle and viewed by would-be artist Hitler as a kind of kindred spirit, confesses that he has been countermanding his scorched-earth orders behind his back, Hitler reacts not as we might expect, by flying into a rage, but with a silent, disappointed resignation, and as the scene ends we see a tear in his eye. In addition to being quite possibly the only time Hitler has ever been shown on the verge of tears, this is also likely the only time he is shown kissing Eva Braun (although the lip-lock, as she refuses to be sent away and vows to stay with him until the end, gives the impression that it may have more to do with a surge of gratitude for one of those few who remain truly loyal to him than any real romance). Those who claim the film goes too easy on Hitler base their accusations on scenes like these. But one need only watch the film in its entirety to see that the overall depiction is not a flattering one. Moments of kindness aside, Hitler is shown throughout the film to be a twisted, self-absorbed figure veering between melodramatic self-pity and bursts of anger, incessantly bemoaning his own grand dreams come to nothing, but coldly dismissing the urging of his Generals to evacuate the civilian population. He grasps desperately at straws, depending on salvation from divisions which exist only on paper, and throws volcanic tantrums when anyone summons enough nerve to tell him so. He increasingly sees traitors everywhere, still speaks of the Third Reich in future tense when it should be obvious to anyone that defeat is imminent, pontificates on the senselessness of compassion, and when told that young German soldiers are dying in the thousands for a lost cause, he shrugs and replies with searingly casual heartlessness that that's what young men are for. To him, they are no longer fit to live because they have proven themselves weak, and as he says himself, "I will not shed one tear for them". If he is capable of shedding tears at all, it is apparently only for himself.
Alexandra Maria Lara, a young, pretty, Romanian-born and German-raised actress, adds a needed dash of humanity and comparative normalcy as the impressionable Traudl Junge, who to some degree is under the Führer's spell herself, but is not as far gone as others and witnesses the bizarre events around her with mounting horror. We get the sense that she wants to believe in the Führer, wants to believe in his dreams of a last-minute turn in the tide, but can't shut out reality as easily as Eva Braun or Josef and Magda Goebbels. "It's all so unreal", she despairs at one point, "like a dream where you can't ever wake up", and the audience will inevitably gravitate towards her as one of the only sympathetic principal characters, but at the same time, is anyone here really completely innocent? Traudl comes across as a nice girl caught up in events that take her to a place she never intended to go, but as the real Junge admits in the epilogue, she pretty much allowed herself to be caught up in them, and if she didn't know anything about the Holocaust, it was because she didn't want to. It's one thing to argue for the innocence of Private Schmidt, manning a pillbox on the Normandy coast, but these people were members of Hitler's entourage, in close daily contact with him for years. Is it possible they truly didn't know he was insane? Indifferent towards his own people? Obsessively anti-Semitic? With the obvious exception of the Goebbels children, too young to comprehend the situation or the true nature of their beloved "Uncle Hitler", are any of these characters, even those who behave more admirably than others, really innocent?
If it's somewhat difficult to make a moral judgment about Traudl Junge, many of the other characters are easier to come to a conclusion about. Ulrich Matthes plays Josef Goebbels as an icy fanatic who declares with what sounds like a kind of bloodthirsty satisfaction that "the people chose their own fate and now their little throats are going to be cut", but he's surpassed by Corinna Harfouch as Magda Goebbels, a woman who is thrown into hysterics by Hitler's plans for suicide but can methodically murder her own six children with chilling self-control. Magda is arguably the most disturbing character in a movie with more than its share of disturbing characters, an ice queen with a will of steel so unshakably devoted to Hitler that to her warped mindset, murdering her children is a kinder fate than leaving them to grow up in a world without Nazism. It's interesting that she and her husband are portrayed as having a curiously hollow, almost nonexistent relationship (as do Hitler and Eva Braun, at least on his side). In fact, at times Magda almost seems to drag Josef along in her wake. Albert Speer's memoirs Inside The Third Reich gives the impression that things were more evenly matched, or even the other way around, but we may never know the exact dynamics of their relationship. Juliane Köhler makes Eva Braun a vacuous party girl, laughing and dancing as though nothing is happening, but we suspect that this is her way of blocking out the grim reality. Her adored Adolf's insanity and venom should be obvious to anyone, let alone his longtime mistress, but Eva either cannot see it or- perhaps more accurately- simply refuses to.
Even the characters who appear briefly are well-depicted. Heinrich Himmler drops by early on, aptly played by Ulrich Noethen as a self-important twit deluded enough to think the Allies will allow him and his SS to remain in power after the war, and wondering with complete seriousness whether he should give General Eisenhower the Nazi salute or shake his hand. Even more fine is Heino Ferch as the dapper, inscrutable architect Albert Speer, who urges Hitler not to go through with his plans for total destruction but remains an enigmatic figure. He's obviously the most level-headed, composed, and realistic of the high-ranking Nazis, but he never wears his emotions on his sleeve, and we're never entirely sure what's going on inside his head. The only member of the inner circle whose portrayal is somewhat disappointing is Martin Bormann, who is played by the buffoonish-looking Thomas Thieme and despite being generally regarded as one of the most influential members of Hitler's court, has so little screentime and dialogue that he seems to barely be in the movie.
Ganz as Hitler is the centerpiece of the film, but the most disturbing and affecting scene Downfall has to offer does not even involve him. It is Magda Goebbels committing the most unthinkable act possible for a mother---the murder of her own six children. The scene is bloodless, non-violent; having already given the children a sleeping pill, she methodically goes from one to the other cracking cyanide pills inside their mouths. It's a truly disturbing scene, and hard to watch even after knowing from the children's first appearance that it's coming. A fraction of a second in which Magda's face of stone threatens to crack only makes her all the more horrific. What kind of woman could summon the willpower to do this? Furthermore, what woman would want to?
There are other striking moments along the way- Hitler's first intimidating explosion at his General Staff, Josef Goebbels' icy indifference to the fate of the children and old men he and Hitler are sending into battle, the final conversation between Hitler and Speer, and Hitler and Eva's morbid discussion of the best way to commit suicide (he favors a gun, but Eva prefers poison and insists with typical emptyheadedness that "I want to look good when I'm dead"). Any argument that the film portrays Hitler sympathetically is eradicated by a dinner scene in which he lectures on the senselessness of compassion, dismissing it as "priests' drivel". The closest this cold-hearted, warped man seems capable of coming to a kind gesture is to present Traudl Junge with a cyanide capsule. The filmmakers set up an uncanny reenactment of the final newsreel footage to be taken of the Führer, in which he shamelessly awards Iron Crosses to ten and twelve-year-old "soldiers" fighting with bazookas against Russian tanks. Some viewers worried that the film would inspire pity for the mentally and physically broken dictator. My reaction after watching the film was that I felt that I had a better understanding of the way Hitler thought and acted and saw himself, but I did not feel sorry for him. There are scenes in this movie- those previously mentioned, and others- which can make one feel more like slamming his head into the wall than pitying him. Along with such films as The Pianist, Downfall, ironically filming in Russia with St. Petersburg standing in for 1945 Berlin, convincingly recreates a city devastated by war. I'm not exactly sure how they recreate such a war-ravaged landscape, but it all looks very authentic. Be warned that it also doesn't shy away from graphic violence; we see a long string of characters shooting themselves in the head toward the end, and doctors sawing off wounded soldiers' legs and feet and basically things you should expect to see in a war movie like this.
But how much interest will Der Untergang hold for the average moviegoer? A cold-blooded, selfish, psychotic group of people- with a couple of better ones stuck in between them- hole up in a bunker for ten days and then kill themselves. If the audience forms an emotional attachment to anyone, it is almost certain to be Traudl Junge, and many will feel pity for Peter Kranz and the Goebbels children, but most of the other principal characters are beyond comprehension, let alone sympathy. What it can say something about is the nature of fanaticism, the extraordinary hold that one charismatic, powerful figure can hold over dozens, hundreds, thousands, even millions of others which makes them willing and eager to sacrifice their own lives for him. The unquestioning loyalty- even stupidity- of Generals Jodl, Keitel, Krebs, and Burgdorf, complaining about Hitler's insane orders and then in the next breath vehemently defending him against any questioning of his authority. What kind of hold does he have over such men, that they know he is insane and are still willing to follow his every command anyway? Magda Goebbels murdering her own six children to spare them the misery of having to live in a world without Adolf Hitler. Such displays of fanatical devotion are frightening, and they are by no means confined to Nazi Germany or the Third Reich. Dozens committed suicide with Jim Jones in Africa. Suicide bombers blow themselves up at the command of Osama bin Laden. Downfall gives a palpable sense of the kind of fanaticism it requires to do such things. That, and it is one of the finest WWII films ever made.
****
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