A worthy and important work

Rating: Null/10 (1 May 2005)

This is the first German film in 50 years in which Hitler is a central character and almost five million Germans have seen it at the cinema, so it is clearly an important work which represents a honest attempt to face the nation's history in a manner which would be unthinkable from present-day Japan. Of course, this real life version of Gotterdammerung is familiar material to viewers of a certain age or education, but nevertheless the narrative - the last 10 days of the Fuhrer's infamous life - is utterly compelling.
The work is an immense achievement for Bernd Eichinger who both wrote and produced it. Although based on two detailed accounts of the claustrophobic life in the bunker - "Until The Final Hour" by Hitler's young secretary Traudl Junge (from whose perspective the film is shot) and "Inside Hitler's Bunker" by German historian Joachim Fest - Eichinger has clearly done enormous research and has attempted to root all the significant scenes in a documentary source. He was aided by a fine director Oliver Hirschbiegel and a sizeable (for a European work) budget ($16M).
Above all though, the film works because of the mesmerizing performance of the Swiss German actor Bruno Ganz as the dictator losing all sense of reality as his dream of a thousand-year Reich is blasted away by Soviet artillery and - as he sees it - the lack of will of the German people. Among a uniformly excellent cast, Ulrich Matthes gives a chilling portrayal as Joseph Goebbels and the scene where Corinna Harfouch as Magda Goebbels murders their six children, because she cannot bear them to live without National Socialism, is the most disturbing in a work that could haunt one for a long time through its violent images.
The movie is framed by events involving the secretary Traudl Junge: her job 'interview' in 1942 by a Hitler who seems interested only in that she is from his beloved Munich and an extract from an interview that she recorded just before her death in 2002 when she admits that her youth was no excuse for not thinking about her political seduction. This framing device works well, as does the concluding reminder of the war's toll (six million Jews killed and a total of 60M deaths) and of the post-war experience of the leading characters.
Any work about Hitler and especially one by a German production team is bound to attract controversy. The film has been criticised by reviewers for making Hitler too human, but I think that Eichinger has answered this well by insisting: "If he had been a monster rather than a man, it would take the guilt away from other people". It has also been challenged by historians for not making clear the Nazi background of Junge and the war crimes of some of the characters who are portrayed more sympathetically than others, but even a work of this scope cannot indulge in so much back-filling.
A final danger is that the film might be seen as representing at least elements of the German forces as valiant fighters to the last and the German people themselves as in a sense victims of Hitler's mania, but I feel that a balanced assessment of the work would acquit it of such a charge. My wife and I saw "Downfall" with a Jewish couple who are very close friends and who, between them lost four grand-parents in the Holocaust. They too found it a worthy work which is sufficient validation for me.