Well worth watching (once)

Rating: 8/10 (25 August 2005)

Downfall, as it was titled in Britain, is an extraordinary balancing act that is somehow sensitive and brutal, exciting and depressing, numbing and inspirational. It is, admittedly, overlong and thus occasionally dull, but it is worth it all the same.
Like Das Boot and All Quiet on the Western Front, it is able to play your sympathy for the characters' humanity against your instinct that they (mostly) deserve to die. Every time a Nazi kills himself - and this happens on average once every fifteen minutes - you feel a mixture of sadness at the pointless loss of life and guilty satisfaction that it was self-delusion that got them there. How much sympathy and how much satisfaction depends on the character, and so you get the full range of emotions as they drop one by one.
The most poignant deaths are not those of Hitler and Goebbels, who deserve no sympathy, or, at the other extreme, non-combatant Berliners, but those in the middle. Eva Braun is clearly delusional, but does this excuse her guilt? Goebbel's children sing adoringly for the Fuhrer, but cannot be held responsible for their indoctrination.
The audience also has to question whether all Nazis lacked any moral fibre. How should we feel about Albert Speer, the Nazi who escaped death at Nuremberg because he apologised? Or the general who comes across as a professional soldier whose crime was to accept orders from a lunatic master.
The portrayal of the shelling of Berlin, where street combat goes hand in hand with decadent end-of-the-world partying, is equally intense. It is reminiscent of both Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan in its skillful combination grand scale and poignant detail.
My only complaint is that it is a about half an hour too long. The last reel, which is death after death after death, would have been all the more powerful if I wasn't wondering how much longer it would last.
This is fine film-making nonetheless, although I doubt I would ever want to watch it again.