Brilliant humanising portrayal of Hitler's final days.

Rating: 8/10 (14 May 2005)

"Downfall" is the dramatisation of Joachim Fest's marvellous book, detailing the thankfully premature end of Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich.
We follow Traudl Junge, who in 1942 is given the immense privilege of becoming Hitler's personal secretary. The real Traudl provides commentary at the beginning and end of the film that helps provide a moral compass reading for this immaculately detailed and forceful dramatisation.
I expected to see something much more stagy and claustrophobic, but the film counterpoints the stark, sterile bunker against the gutted streets of battlefield Berlin, this is clearly no made-for-TV historical drama, the evocation of a city, and a people on the edge of destruction are grimly realistic and clinically accurate. The violence seems somewhat inconsistent, we see very little blood and guts, we see something of the horrors of a make-shift surgery, along with hack-saw amputations, but this is far removed from "Saving Private Ryan". Maybe Oliver Hirschbiegel thought that overt gore might be considered a distraction from what's really important, maybe so, but this for me stood as the only real inconsistency in the production.
The dark heart of the film is of course Adolf Hitler. Bruno Ganz provides a portrayal of Hitler that transcends impersonation, we see a man who is greater than the sum of his world famous odd-ball mannerisms, Ganz provides a level of humanity and reality that makes the unfolding events all the more compelling to watch. We meet Hitler the tee-total, dog-loving vegetarian, a man who often shows great compassion and humility. The Hitler we expect to see, the man gripped by nationalistic paranoia and chilling racism is ever present, ready at any moment to launch into venomous rants that become increasingly irrational and unhinged as he descends into the titular downfall.
While Ganz is always enthralling to watch, we know what we're getting with Hitler, much more interesting are the Nazi clique. Amongst Hitler's closest confidants we have Joseph and Magfa Goebbels, whose zeal for Hitler's new order renders them into suicide-cultists, unable to accept the possibility of life after the death of their leader, even for their six children. Likewise for Eva Braun, whose devotion to her beloved Hitler is so complete that she wantonly shares his fate.
The film gained most controversy with its representation Nazis like Prof. Ernst-Günter Schenck (humanitarian and rationalist). You are reminded that you can no more judge a man by his uniform, than a book by its cover. You never sense that the film is trying to mitigate Nazi crimes, but remind you that the crimes were committed by humans with varying degrees of complicity.
In the end "Downfall" is an important reminder that we demonize the Nazis at our very great peril. Winning the war on our terms we were able to paint Nazism as some kind of supernatural plague. I often hear people say how important it is that we remember what the Germans did, so that such evil can never again be allowed to go unchecked. What's wrong with this? Since 1945 the unspeakable evil of the Nazis seems to have worked as an effective camouflage for numerous horrors, from the ravages of Stalinism and China's Cultural Revolution right up to Rwanda and Yugoslavia. It seems to me that the only lesson we have learnt from the Nazis is that if you want to perpetrate massive acts of unspeakable evil, keep the noise down, complacent super powers are trying to sleep!