Downfall (Der Untergang) 
Directed by: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Written by: Bernd Eichinger
Starring: Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Corinne Harfouch, Ulrich Matthes, Juliane Köhler, Heino Ferch, Christian Berkel
Country: Germany

            

Three and a half cyanide capsules

Reviewed by Hal Gray

The Power of Shame.

Downfall is the latest of countless films about Adolf Hitler and of a few about his infamous last days in Der Bunker. Director Oliver Hirschbiegel, with his commitment to historical accuracy and a fine eye for the events, makes this effort arguably the best so far.

Many countries, the UK and the USA chief among them, have had a shot at putting Hitler up on the screen and several actors have done a credible job at getting behind the manic eyes of Herr Shickelgrüber, Sir Alec Guinness (The Last Ten Days [1973]) most notable among them.

Much has been made of the fact that Downfall is the first German film about Hitler's demise and that its social significance is particularly meaningful to a German people that have refused to speak about their past these many decades. In fact, another keenly drawn film (also titled The Last Ten Days) was made in 1956 with a German cast and crew. That it only found an audience outside of the Fatherland is proof it has taken this long for German cinema to catch up with their fresh historical writings of the past few years. So, while Downfall might be of intellectual interest to the rest of the world, for Germany it is more visceral and thus a more important film.

Hirschbiegel must be credited for presenting an even-handed, mostly unemotional approach to this story. It has a semi-documentary feel that keeps the viewer at a distance even while powerful characters fill the screen and horrendous events unfold. But he does draw us in bit by bit by using the p.o.v. of Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara), Hitler's secretary from 1942 to the end in 1945. Although Junge cannot by necessity be in every scene, it's still her sensibilities that frame the film. (The real Traudl Junge's voice opens the movie over a black screen and the final shot is an interview with her in 2001 shortly before her death.)

One can imagine that it's a claustrophobic world in the bunker, actually a succession of rooms housing dozens of people. But Hirschbiegel takes us up onto the streets of Berlin where the impending doom of no escape is equally palpable and confining. Dirty-faced children man anti-tank rockets. Neighbours violently turn against neighbours. And the population is thrown to the advancing Russian army as the punishment for failure. When Joseph Goebbels is asked if he has any compassion for the civilians, (paraphrasing) he says without irony, "None. They were the ones that elected us. Now let them suffer the consequences for their poor decisions."

There's not a lot of room for characters to change or ‘grow' here. What we have is an end game. Hitler—wonderfully played by Swiss actor Bruno Ganz—is a broken man, his palsied hand clutched behind his back from his first scene. Already mad, he descends into his own private hell as the screws of his own making take their final turns. If a smile emerges from his limbic and thuggish scowl, it's not to be believed. His futile rants paralyze most of his generals, and that is the final tragedy. They could have saved two million lives by capitulating to the Russians, but didn't for fear of one pathetic man.

Eva Braun (Juliane Köhler, Nowhere In Africa) is kind-hearted and a bit dim. Nero-like, she prefers to dance while Berlin burns. Traudl's horror grows as she sees Hitler for who he really is. She can't believe her taking the secretarial job on a capricious whim has led her to this. Various other characters deal with the grim situation by drinking themselves into a stupor before they stick a Luger in their mouth.

Relevant here is Gray's Cosmic Law No. 3: ‘All fanatical idealists are in actual practice an antithesis of the ideal.'

Nothing could be truer than of this band of ‘believers'. None of them fit either the physical or mental Aryan ideal. Hitler, dark and small in stature, was the prototypical whiner and finger-pointer that a Germany left barren and shamed by the Treaty of Versailles could embrace. Himmler, chief of the Gestapo, was pudgy with poor eyesight. Field Marshall Göring fled the debacle like a rat. Doktor Goebbels had a face like a decaying death mask. And Madame Goebbels, über mother of the Third Reich, killed her six angelic, tow-haired children one by one by breaking a capsule of cyanide between their rosy lips.

Hirschbiegel could have left us there, but incredibly he leaves viewers with a ray of hope. In the penultimate scene, blue skies prevail and Traudl, having made her implausible, but real escape, pedals a wobbly bicycle to freedom. She carries a blond, young boy (Germany's future?) on the bar in front of her. And lastly, Traudl, as an old woman, recounts her epiphany about her personal culpability in not trying to find out what was going on outside the bunker of her life.

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