Downfall

Downfall - 2004

Downfall takes place almost entirely in Hitler's underground bunker, during the final days of World War II. Hitler is played brilliantly by Bruno Gantz. Hitler is ill, mad, compassionate, racist, paranoid.... human. The controversy that surrounded this film centered around this fact - Hitler did evil things, Hitler was directly responsible for millions of innocent deaths... and Hitler was human. Throughout American cinema we are used to seeing Hitler as monster, Hitler as Satan, Hitler as supernatural evil. Does this movie, in humanizing Hitler provoke sympathy? I'm thinking that by showing Hitler as a delusional paranoid, hanging on to what little he has left - the answer is no.

We see him ordering troops and units into position that do not exist, looking for deliverance from brigades that have long fallen away. As the Russian troops slowly move in on Berlin, Hitler alternately displays emotional outbursts of anger, tender compassion for his wife and for his secretary, Traudl Junge, and long moments of isolation and desertion. The movie is told largely through the eyes of Traudl. We hear comments from the real life Junge before and after the movie. Her book Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretaryis the basis for the movie's script.

As Hitler becomes more and more out of touch with reality, we see those loyal to him confronted with the ultimate decision - stay with Hitler, face certain death; but remain loyal to the vision of National Socialism - or face reality and get out now. Some are so loyal they do the unspeakable. In fact the most unsettling and shocking scene I can remember in any film [seriously!] involves Joseph and Magda Goebbels. Magda cannot envision a world without National Socialism. And she does not want her six children to live without it either. In the sad and shocking scene, she gives her children a sleeping potion, then proceeds to give them one by one a cyanide capsule. We hear the soft crunch of the capsule as she presses their jaws closed.

I had to turn away.

Rodger Ebert said that he felt sympathy for the Hitler character as he would feel sympathy for a rabid dog that had to be put down.

The director, Oliver Hirschbiegel, shows us the horror of the war outside the bunker, which keeps us rooted in the reality of the situation. As the Hitler loyalists, one by one, succumb to suicide or murder; by the end of the film we are relieved and thank God that we were born post 1945.

Research the film on Amazon here.

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