FILM REVIEW; Downfall - a monster, a myth, a man

It’s difficult to talk about Hitler as a man, and it’s equally difficult to think about the Nazi party as anything more than a band of villains and thugs. Hitler and his Nazis are shorthand for demons, a reference to man’s ultimate evil, but never a reference to men. Downfall, a film about the last days of World War II wants, at least on some level, to challenge that attitude. Covering the last few days of Hitler’s stand against the Germans, it’s a fantastically gripping piece of drama that seems determined to humanize Hitler without removing his monstrous aura. In doing so, it becomes a film about belief’s capacity to corrupt, and the result is a pervasive hopelessness buoyed by a few lonely pillars of tacit courage.

Shot with a gritty, indie-film sensibility, the cinematography is filled with earthy tones and shaky, documentary style close-ups. This sets the film apart from its historical epic counterparts (Ridley Scott – that’s you), making it personal and character based. There are plenty of wartime fireworks to be found, but Downfall is about individuals, not spectacle.

The individual at the forefront, of course, is Hitler himself, and the film seems determined to paint him as distinctly human without demythologizing his evil. In Downfall, Hitler is a smoldering wreck of a man, a downed giant who barks impossible orders and genuflects on the finer points of suicide, equally mad in calm and rage. Like Berlin, the city-in-siege in which he is bunkered down, his demise is imminent. But under his rash, unstable command, neither he nor his city will relent to the pressures posed by either the Russian onslaught or the increasingly disturbed German commanders. Hitler is hurtling towards his own death and trying to drag his beloved city along with him.

The film’s many supporting characters carry the film through its long running time, and it is to director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s credit that he balances the large cast so well. Most heartening are Hitler’s secretary, Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara) and Dr. Ernst-Guter Schenk, a German doctor who defies orders in order to assist suffering German troops. Junge, whose real-life counterpart speaks the film’s opening and closing words, is fresh faced and innocent, a young woman happy to have a respectable job in the German government. Her character provides the transition from acceptance to horror at what the Nazis did. Schenk’s doctor is the film’s moral center, a reasonable man who wants only to help the German people. Caught in an impossible situation, he does what little he can to ease their insurmountable suffering.

This is fortunate, because suffering and failure are at the very center of this film’s story. The final half hour is a relentless parade of death, primarily suicide, that digs mercilessly into the Nazi defeat. The party’s true believers, and there were many, cannot fathom the possibility of anything less than total success; they had become convinced that their victory was guaranteed. Their surrender, right after Hitler’s suicide, results in an extreme, violent cognitive dissonance, and many follow their dictator’s lead and take their lives.

Watching Magda Goebbels beg for Hitler to not to kill himself and the poison her children is Downfall’s cruelest, bluntest moment, and it suggests a dark, destructive side to the power of faith. Frau Goebbels’ fervent belief in the ultimate victory of National Socialism was, as with much of the country, unshakably ingrained; the permanence and certainty of that belief led both her and her country to ruin.

At one point, her husband Joseph, leader of the Nazi SS, says that of the German citizenry, he “feels no sympathy.” His approach to killing is cold and businesslike. Despite its dramatic density, the same might be said for Downfall’s treatment of both its subjects and audience.