Fascinating and uncompromising look at the final days

Rating: 9/10 (8 July 2007)

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)
It was agreeable to see Hitler reduced to a bent, defeated, raving madman, and there is no question that Bruno Ganz looked the part. The endearments he gave to the children and to his bunker mates contrasted horrifically with his plan for them and his "love" for the German people. In a sense the way the final days are presented in this film reminded me of what the victims of the Nazis suffered, and that was also apropos and agreeable. Still most people do not like to see human suffering even to those who may, by all that is right, have it coming; and so it was essentially a depressing experience to watch this film.
Alexandria Maria Lara, who played Hitler's last personal secretary, Traudl Junge, provided the only bright spot in this necessarily grim picture. She is a fine actress, but somehow she seemed too normal, too smart actually to be the sort of worshipful underling that she must have been. Incidentally, it is from the book by the real Traudl Junge, Biz sur letzten Stunde, and from Joachim Fest's Der Untergang that this movie was adapted. The fine screenplay was written by Bernd Eichinger. Junge appears at the beginning of the film from an interview in 2001, a year before her death, to say a few words and at the end where she explains that she is essentially not that naive young person she once was who should have looked further than the fuhrer's face to see what was really going on. But she was with Hitler for three years and knew his philosophy well. Truth is she was so pleased to be his secretary that she turned a deaf ear to the truth that was in front of her.
Of course she was hardly the only one. An entire nation was seduced and led down the path to genocide, humiliation, starvation, near-starvation, and ignominious defeat. One thing the film does to help us understand how this could have happened is to show the blind loyalty that even some of the highest ranking officers felt toward Hitler regardless of his bumbling, his stupidity and his blatant disregard for the feelings and lives of anyone who got in his way--his essential immorality. Some say there was something in the German character that accounts for this blind obedience to authority regardless of how corrupted and evil that authority might be. Maybe in a more pluralistic and multicultural society something like this could not happen. There might be something to that, but I doubt it. Too many monsters have grown in too many different soils and in so many different cultures, I am persuaded it could happen anywhere, but perhaps not as easily and as completely as it happened in Germany.
It is interesting that Oliver Hirshbiegel, who directed, did not show the Red Army atrocities as they stormed into Berlin. I don't think he wanted to dilute the sense of the moral culpability of the German people.
I was also struck by Hitler's obsession with loyalty. This is how all dictators, warlords and, unfortunately, some respected heads of state operate: they demand unquestioned loyalty, and they ruthlessly eliminate anyone they suspect of anything but that unquestioned loyalty while rewarding the loyal. And so in such governments the head of state becomes surrounded by sycophants and toadies who tell him what he wants to hear and who live in fear of their own lives should they somehow be seen as disloyal. Indeed they sneak around trying to undermine others in other to protect themselves. They live in secrecy amid lies, intrigue and murder.
The film is long, 155 minutes, the bunker is dreary and most of the characters are sickies of the worse sort. We as an audience are reduced to those who see inside a cave, the floor covered with bat guano crawling with despicable creatures who feed off of one another. The stench is overwhelming. We watch transfixed for a while at the ugly, unsavory spectacle and then we turn away.
Can it happen again? Can it happen here? Let's hope not, but that freedom that the right assures us is not free requires more than loyalty. It requires vigilance and a willingness to speak out, the kind of vigilance that can see the danger when the government begins to deal almost exclusively in lies and misinformation, that invades other countries for dubious gain, deals in propaganda and points fingers at perceived enemies and promotes only those loyal to the leader instead of those most qualified.
(I said I would write this review without mentioning a certain personage, and I did, but the allusions are probably more than obvious.) See this for veteran Swiss-German actor Bruno Ganz who gave a fine performance as Hitler.