Devastating, necessary, and very brave

Rating: 10/10 (5 November 2005)

A highlight of the Russian art exhibit at the Guggenheim is a propaganda picture of Stalin and other Soviet leaders (some, like Bukharin, about to be purged) smiling and greeting an exemplary worker. It's very large and somehow comic and shocking at the same time. It's very hard to imagine a picture of Hitler and the Nazi elite ever being displayed like that, even 100 years from now. Possibly Stalin and Mao were responsible for more deaths than Hitler, certainly of their own people, and they were no less insane, especially in their final years. Maybe because they died still in power, they've never been dramatized as Hitler has been so many times. The Alec Guiness Last 10 Days of Hitler covered much the same ground as Der Untergang, but Bruno Ganz has outdone any previous portrayals. This film is relentless in making the audience experience life in the bunker and also in the streets of Berlin above. Josef and Magda Goebbels have never been so real and frightening. Eva Braun has never seemed so frantic and pathetic. It took great courage for German filmmakers to approach this subject so honestly. Ironically, while war-torn Warsaw in The Pianist was recreated on a Berlin sound-stage, it appears from the final credits that the Berlin of Der Untergang was shot in St. Petersburg. This is a great antidote to the Russian film Moloch, made at Berchtesgaden, which made the Nazis clowns instead of monsters. Stupid and banal they were, but not funny. Charles Chaplin said that if he had known about the death camps he would have never made The Great Dictator. There is no comic relief, nor any tragic dignity either, in this harrowing and graphic account of the end of an evil tyranny.