Chilling, insightful, and stunning - Ganz is truly amazing

Rating: 9/10 (28 April 2005)

Robert Altman once said that if every movie were like its trailer, every movie would be exactly the same. The TV ads for Oliver Hirschbiegel's "Downfall," starring Bruno Ganz as Hitler, are making it look like an action war movie about heroes and villains. There are a handful of explosions in the movie, and all of them are in that ad  and little else. Those expecting violence and a neatly packaged message may be disappointed, or perhaps, like me, surprised by the movie's insights, depths and power.
The movie does, certainly, have scenes of carnage and battle  how could a movie set in Berlin in the last days of World War II not?  but the majority of the story unfolds in the claustrophobic rooms and corridors of Hitler's bunker. The movie follows the stories of Hitler, Eva Braun, Traudl Junge, Hitler's private secretary, and a doctor whose conscience gets the better of him.
Hitler has been represented in countless other movies, and he is usually shown as a caricature of evil, or a mocking imitation (most famously in Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator"). Ganz's performance surpasses them all; it surpasses imitation, and he presents Hitler as human, as a paradox, as a man affected by both evil and madness. There is a pre-title scene where he stands upright in his early days in power, as he hires a secretary. He has a certain charm over women and, later, we see the way that children, too, adore him; 'Uncle Hitler,' they call him. Later, as the end of the war looms, we see the cruel way he presides over his maps and diagrams, ordering troops into certain death. He is so cut-off from humanity that his view is that if Berlin falls, its inhabitants do not deserve to live. His back becomes hunched as he barks out orders, his hands darting in all directions; its astonishing to consider that this is the same actor who was so serene and introverted in Wim Wender's "Wings of Desire."
The two main criticisms I have heard made of "Downfall" are that it is not historically accurate, and that Hitler becomes too human; too sympathetic. "Downfall" may not include all the facts, but it is not propaganda; it has no political motives or agenda. Its motives are to help the audience question situations and events that are beyond the grasp of most modern people's understanding. Movies are not the medium for fact; the truth of "Downfall" is in the way it sums up the conflicting feelings of a deceived and confused people.
What would have been wrong and 'inaccurate' would be to deny the fact that Hitler was a person, and not just an evil force, like something from a comic book. I'm not trying to say he was not an evil person; just that an evil person is still a person.
Yes, it is a 'troubling' movie, as Stanley Kauffman pointed out in his review. How could it not be? What use would a movie which showed Hitler as lacking humanity have? What interest would it have? The movie is being criticised where it should be praised; it does not manipulate the audience, or tell you how to feel. That's where its power comes from. Watching the real Traudl Junge at the movie's end, I had tears in my eyes. It's difficult to say what is so moving about the film. When Hitler dies, we do not sympathise with him; in fact we feel a certain relief, because it means the end is in sight. His way out was an easy one, but the others had to live the rest of their lives with a burden on their conscience. Traudl Junge liked Hitler as a person, and that was her own downfall.