Important and controversial

Rating: 7/10 (18 August 2007)

Although it's a good film, it was just as interesting to read the comments  especially from Germany. It's true, whenever a film such as this comes out portraying the Third Reich not as an Indiana Jones-type Empire of Evil, we Germans turn around in advance protesting: "This is not meant to justify anything! Of course Hitler was a monster!" I don't think anyone seriously judges young Germans today by what their great-grandparents did, but it's of course something never to be forgotten. Sadly, it's also a convenient stereotype in politics and movie-making that tends show demons instead of humans, with the effect that we no longer understand just how on earth such things were possible. Hopefully it will take a very long time before the Nazis are surpassed in evil. But closing our eyes to the real Hitler, Stalin or Mao and their minions in favor of a legend will prevent us from ever understanding how these things work. "If you look into the Abyss, it looks back into you" (Nietzsche?). Movies like this one challenge the viewer's ability to look and do some honest self-reflection, or we all might wake up one day to the same bad realization, that we chased a dream and killed millions along the way.
"The Downfall" suggests how hard it was to be an outsider and not be affected by Nazi propaganda, and how well Hitler had managed to brainwash his troupe, especially the SS, into believing Germany was to be Sparta reincarnated, whose code of honor called upon everyone to fight to the death and without mercy. He ruled his admirers by being the source of their ideals (read: delusions of grandeur), pride, hope and fear. Bruno Ganz has justly been praised for his performance, and what he did was just enough  to make Hitler more mesmerizing as well as menacing would have invited unnecessary criticism. But imagine for once Anthony Hopkins in that role  the outcries of indignation! And the stacks of fan letters ...! (Hopkins actually played Hitler on TV in dark pre-Lecter times.) This Hitler is rather funny in his spitting and raving.
I was often annoyed by the kitschy music when suffering civilians and wounded are shown  scenes like these are stronger without it  and also by the urge to show "good" Germans, in the moral sense of the word. Not one of them, except the SS commandos hanging "traitors" in the streets, is fanatic enough to be entirely unsympathetic. There are some really memorable quotes by Hitler which serve as historical cues: "Mercy is a crime against the people" is the most remarkable. Juliane Köhler is striking as Eva Braun  she speaks volumes with her eyes, as is Magda Goebbels (Corinna Harfouch) who kills her children in cold blood (and allegedly had a thing for Hitler, but that's subtle in the film)  the "bravest mother of the Third Reich" indeed, by Hitler's standards! Joseph Goebbels, apart from a superficial resemblance, remains bland and not half the intellectual, charismatic orator he really was, and the rest of the cast is not particularly impressive either. The film's atmospheric moments are inside the bunker, when a grenade hits and suddenly the wild merriment stops, and you feel a claustrophobia and sense of dread that makes the goings-on seem like a mad fever dream. That was when I felt the fiction was real.
Some commentators have called this the best WW2-movie they ever saw. It's maybe the most complex recent "big screen" issue about Germany's Hitler madness  so far. My "favorite" is a Russian film (I can't recall the title) that shows what Germans  and Russians  did on the Eastern front, mostly seen through the eyes of a Russian boy whose village is burned down with its inhabitants locked inside the church, to which the SS set fire. Though not as grisly in detail as "Saving Private Ryan", it depicts the events Hitler's "table talk" set into motion in all their bestiality and without all false sentimentality. We should not forget that most of the war victims besides Jews were Russians, and for the latter the killing was far from over after 1945. They have their own story about killing for ideology or conformity that I'd really like to see made into a film as challenging as this one.