One of the best foreign films of the year

Rating: 10/10 (9 March 2005)

Quite simply, the story of Downfall is of the final days of the third Reich, held up in a bunker in the center of Berlin, as Adolf Hitler and his closest minions go deeper into the hole they've dug for themselves (told through the perspective, for the most part, of Hitler's last secretary Traudl Junge). I'm not sure if it is a great film or not on a first viewing, as it is a highly emotional experience along with it being intellectual at times. It's a complex film with a specific look, and the documentary-style that borders sometimes on being too much (depending on the viewer).
One aspect of the film right off that fascinated me was the look. Director Hirschbiegel and DP Rainer Klaussman give scenes (I'm not certain all of them) a certain yellow-greenish tint. Perhaps this world we are seeing is meant to look like a sort of death, in a sickly kind of hue inside and outside the bunker. Or, this is just part of the style of the camera, which is often hand-held, and meant to have a Saving Private Ryan approach to the horrors of warfare. The details of most of the victims (many of which not innocent) of battle wounds or suicides are not sugar-coated with any kind of hyper-kinetic style. It's very straightforward, and all the more shocking. When Hirschbiegel shoots a pan across people (sometimes Children) that are already dead, it's certainly far more jarring than could be expected. Spielberg may try for the gritty, 'no-holds-barred' direction of the horrors of war and Nazism, a filmmaker from the country of its origin has a certain advantage.
The story that unfolds in Downfall is of course a doomed one at the start (doomed for everyone in the story, the Nazis and the un-seen millions of victims of Europe included). It would be one thing for the filmmakers to punch up the story of Hitler's demise with melodrama, however an aspect to the film that doesn't cheat the audience (German, American, or otherwise) is that the story is somehow objective on one level, and on another tries to find someone to connect with. Hitler (played by Wim Wenders regular Bruno Ganz) is the key character to the story, but by making the protagonist the secretary the story does have something of a portal for a viewer amid the lot of crazed, trapped characters.
Hitler is certainly the cold-blooded, Nietzsche-influenced Fuhrer of the lot, and others such as Eva Braun and the Goebbels are proof that what Hitler had in him was infectious not just with his nation at the outset, but also with his closest followers. His generals argue over what to do. The Russians are closing in. Eva throws a birthday party like it's nobody's business, despite bombs coming through the windows. Nazi commanders turn their backs on the Fuhrer one by one, adding to Hitler's ultimate hypocrisy. One brief exchange between two soldiers that caught my attention went as such, "Where should we go?" "I don't know; some place where we're needed."
Speaking of content, I must come to the point of the performances. While some actors in the soldier roles and female parts were well-cast and notable - Alexandra Maria Lara as Traudl is not too forced, though one may not always find her as sympathetic as the film tries to represent - if Downfall lacked a proper actor for Hitler, it could almost slip into farce (and not the classic kind found in Chaplin or the Three Stooges). Bruno Ganz does what I see only on occasion in based-on-life dramas: he goes so deep into character that one figures that no one else could have been this person in this film. Much like with his followers, when he is in the room in a scene, the attention is all on him, as if he was that most wretched of school-teachers who gained attention through the reptilian parts of your brain. Ganz is never over-doing it when the Fuhrer flips out, and he never makes him seem too unbelievable. In other words every look that gets accentuated in a close-up or in the darkness of a room adds to the tension and horror of the whole situation.
When one sees the film upon a first viewing, the story of the Goebbles is likely the most disturbing for any viewer. While Mr. and Mrs. Goebbles' fates are well-documented along with the other monsters, their children's fates make for scenes that bring full circle the insanity of Hitler's own messages- the collapse of compassion, the facade of loyalty and honor, the un-stoppable hatred of Jews and anyone not of 'their' creed, all wrapped together in the climax of the picture.
I really was not sure what to expect from a film like this. I wasn't sure if the filmmakers would try and make Hitler seem the least bit sympathetic. They did not. I left the theater with a hatred that possibly spread further, as I take umbrage to his perversion of Nietzsche, and his ironic taste in food (vegetarian dictator, who knew). And one flaw I saw in the film was that even with being open-minded for the aspect of the 'other', from the German's perspective, there were some people and characters presented that I could not find acceptable under the writing and direction (in other words, in a few bits, the stark realism vanished). If there is anything worthy to find in the film though is it's brutally honest about the nature of fascism, and the outcome of the effects it has on a war machine like the one that unfolded with WW2. History may or may not be fogged as to what precisely happened in that bunker, but in a dramatic style not too far of a stretch from Rossellini's own Germany Year-Zero, it's definitely worth a viewing (that is, in the right frame of mind).