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Downfall

2004, Movie, R, 155 mins

Downfall: Review

DOWNFALL | DER UNTERGANG
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Nominated for a 2004 best foreign-language film Oscar, director Oliver Hirschbiegel's gripping account of Adolf Hitler's ignominious end is a historical reenactment that hits like a swift kick to the gut. Berlin, 1945. With Soviet forces just outside the city, Hitler (Bruno Ganz, in a frightening, career-capping performance) ignores the urgings of his closest advisors to flee and withdraws to his heavily fortified bunker beneath Berlin's blasted streets. He refuses to admit it, but Hitler's glorious thousand-year Reich is crumbling, and so is his mind. Convinced that he's been betrayed by those he trusted most, Hitler takes what comfort he can in the idolaters who gather around him like suicidal moths to a dying flame. They include his maniacally cheerful lady-love, Eva Braun (Juliane Kohler); the dead-eyed Joseph Goebbels (Ulrich Matthes) and his equally terrifying wife, Magda (Corinna Harfouch), who's prepared to murder all six of her children; and his faithful secretary, Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara). As Soviet artillery continues to pound the life out Berlin, the atmosphere in the bunker grows more desperate. Eva throws wild dance parties, soldiers drink themselves into oblivion and Hitler's inner circle reconsider their sworn duty to follow a delusional lunatic who now speaks openly of committing suicide. As if determined to wring the last bit of the Hitler myth from the German psyche, Hirschbiegel (DAS EXPERIMENT, 2001) presents a portrait of the madman that's appalling even by the standards Anthony Hopkins set in the 1981 TV-movie THE BUNKER. Here we see Hitler the ranting, paranoid megalomaniac who boasts of his contempt for the weak. He has no compassion for either the young German soldiers who continue to die on the front lines ("It's what young men are for") or, most shocking of all, the civilians who are getting what he feels they richly deserve. "The German people made a choice," he coldly tells Goebbels, "and now their little throats are being cut." This seems to be the point Hirschbiegel wants most to make — weep not for your Fuhrer, Germany; he hated you in the end — but portraying "ordinary Germans" as seduced and abandoned by a charismatic Hitler can also diffuse culpability. Indeed, Hirschbiegel himself seems reluctant to single out a protagonist, and finally settles on Junge. Recently the subject of the documentary BLIND SPOT: HITLER'S SECRETARY, which presented her tenure with Hitler in far more ambiguous terms, Junge stuck by Hitler until the very end. It wasn't until shortly before her death in 2002 that she admitted she, like everyone else in the bunker, had other options. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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