Hitler's Last Hours in Excruciating, Desultory Detail

Rating: 4/10 (14 December 2005)

Spending over 2 ½ hours witnessing the last hours of Adolf Hitler's life doesn't sound like an exhilarating time, and director Oliver Hirschbiegel's 2004 German-language film has to be one of the more deflating experiences I've had at the movies recently. But that's not to say there aren't moments of great power and passionate, truthful performances. In fact, it feels like quite a breakthrough to have the story actually done in German as it seems targeted to the German populace versus the rest of us interested only in the historical details from the outside. Regardless, the overall effect is enervating from the intentionally methodical approach the filmmaker takes in chronicling the waning moments of the Third Reich. The focal point obviously is the Führer, and Bruno Ganz is powerfully persuasive in alternating between gentility and irrationality but all the while descending into a palpable dementia. It's a vividly rendered performance, which captures all his seeping paranoia and despicable philosophies. The trick for Hirschbiegel and Ganz is not to humanize him to the point of having the viewer feel compassion for this mass murderer because even sixty years after the end of World War II, he continues to exert a powerful fascination. We are intrigued by the psychological forces that gave rise to German National Socialism and shaped its leader, and they successfully pull off the queasy balance of presenting a man who -- before he commits suicide -- speaks with pride about his annihilation of the Jews in Europe. For Hitler and his immediate supporters, the idea of facing the opposition and accounting for those war crimes was unthinkable.
Despite Hitler's dominance in the story, it is mostly viewed from the perspective of his personal secretary Traudl Junge, who was just 22 when the Führer hired her in 1942. For example, the anticipated suicide scene is done behind a closed door as Junge realizes what is happening from the outside. Alexandra Maria Lara portrays Junge with an open naïveté that makes her blind devotion understandable to a great degree, but her character is not interesting enough to hold our interest throughout. Consequently, there is a gallery of characters, Hitler's inner circle, who experiences the end of the war on their own terms. Of course, there is Eva Braun, Hitler's infamous mistress whom he married in the last moments of their lives. As portrayed ebulliently by Juliane Köhler, she is a caretaker for the whole bunker, attempting to get everyone's spirits up with liquor, tabletop dancing and the occasional walk outside for a cigarette. She gradually reveals a more tortured soul worrying about her pregnant sister and confessing her increasing discomfort but remaining steadfast in her devotion to the Führer. But the most fascinating and frightening character is Magda Goebbels, portrayed with a cold veneer of calm by Corinna Harfouch. In certain ways, it's an even gutsier performance than Ganz's. Her real-life character's dedication to the Führer reaches such pathological levels that in the movie's most shocking scene, she forces ampoules of cyanide into the mouths of her sleeping children rather than subject them to the grim prospect of "a world without National Socialism".
Aside from these elements and the shock-inducing recreation of the bombings, the movie is rather dull visually lacking, for example, the panache that Jean-Pierre Jeunet displays in his recent "A Very Long Engagement". Mostly, it has the unimaginative feel of a TV-movie, or given its excessive length, more accurately a miniseries completely driven by dialogue often focused on military tactics and sometimes on the human plight involved. The downbeat tone is relentless, as Hirschbiegel shifts his story between the increasingly desperate military situation above ground in Berlin and the oddly eccentric situation in the bunker underneath it. Perhaps the film's greatest value is the implicit absolution of the German people in blindly following Hitler. When he refuses to express compassion for the civilians, and declares that the Germans have brought their fate upon themselves, the movie is conveying that ordinary Germans were as much victims of Nazism as anyone else, a point raised and refuted 44 years ago in Stanley Kramer's "Judgment at Nuremberg". It's a valid perspective but unfortunately it's buried in an overlong and desultory film.