Portrait of the tyrant as an old man

Rating: 10/10 (4 March 2006)

Paul Auster once wrote a book, 'The Country of Last Things', about a society where nothing new is ever created, and the people subsist on only an-ever reducing collection of recycled goods. This parable of life without hope has been interpreted by many as an allusion to the concentration camps, but it also serves ably as a stylistic description of Berlin in the last days of the war, as depicted in Oliver Hirschbiegel's superb film 'Downfall'. At the centre of the film is a brilliant performance from Bruno Ganz as Hitler, someone who had stripped himself of decency and who here is robbed by defeat first of his charisma, and then of his power, leaving only a vapour of malice and madness clinging to the shell of a man. There are also some interesting portraits of other members of the Nazi inner circle: Speer, dignified but unashamed; Himmler, rational and charmless; and the inhumanly zealous family Goebbels. We also see the life of Hitler's secretaries, who had chosen not to see the truth until it was too late but to do otherwise; one of them (in real life) gives an interview that tops and tails the film. Perhaps the most sympathetic portrayal is that of Eva Braun; her sang-froid, and love of Hitler, are utterly mad but retain some connection with what might be considered admirable qualities in another context.
I recently watched Roman Polanski's 'The Pianist', the best film I have seen about the holocaust, and there is of course a kind of black karma in the way that the Nazi's own fate in ruined Berlin mirrors that of the Jewish heroes of that film, struggling to survive in ruined Warsaw. But the differences are also telling, not just in the way that the Nazis brought their end on themselves, but also in the way that their behaviour, right until the death, has become so utterly divorced from any normal human responses; whereas Polanski's pianist is virtually reduced to his animal essence, the Nazis' twisted idealism seems positively unnatural, yet still believable. Horror films where dozens die at the hands of madmen in confined spaces are ten-a-penny (Hirschbiegel himself has made one, 'The Experiment'); yet this story really happened, and was but a sly coda to the overall war. The awfulness of Hitler's life and actions is perhaps too great for us to truly contemplate; yet in this harrowing picture of his final pathos, Hirshbielgel has made a compelling movie about what happens to humans who forget that they are men.