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Downfall
Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel
Starring: Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Juliane Köhler, Ulrich Matthes, Corinna Harfouch, Christian Berkel, Heino Ferch
Newmarket Films
2005, 155 mins
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| Having been too busy to catch Downfall during its brief sojourn at my local arthouse, I was delighted to see it finally get
the multiplex release it richly deserves. So, up against such daunting competition as Miss Congeniality 2: Armed And Fabulous and
Be Cool, I wondered how many others were going to join me for this screening of what promises to be one of the best films of 2005. We
were 25-30 in the end - respectable for a midweek evening.
Downfall tells the story of the last twelve days of Hitler's reign, leading up to his suicide and the capture of Berlin by Russian forces.
Very ambitiously it sets out to encapsulate what Nazism was about by showing in meticulous detail its final death throes - and it really does succeed brilliantly. |
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| The big players are assembled, of course - Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Speer, Eva Braun - but the viewpoint character, and the axis about which the film revolves, is
Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara), an innocent young woman sucked up into the vortex of events and there to witness her master's terrible denouement in the
claustrophobic bunker under an artillery-shattered Berlin. Early on in the proceedings a manically-in-denial Eva Braun (Juliane Köhler)
throws a jolly champagne party, underscored by Russian gunfire, and Traudl has a panic attack, declaring that everything is like a nightmare that goes on and on, and you want to wake
up from but cannot. And her personal sense of horror ramps up further from here, the nightmare played out on her face for our benefit.
Later she realises exactly why the Goebbels have brought their six children into the bunker, and after watching the blanket-covered bodies of Hitler and Eva carried out to be
burned, she goes and sees for herself the discarded pistols and blood-splattered furniture of their final moments. Traudl's peripheral
angle lends a gripping immediacy and realism that makes the central drama all the more powerful and telling. |
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Here we have Bruno Ganz's Hitler, as accurate and mesmeric a performance of that role as we're ever likely to get. A Hitler talking German in exactly the right grating, hectoring tone, its cadences wearing down any opposition. A Hitler with just the right body language - the hunched shoulders, the twitchily damaged left hand, the menace left with nowhere to go but inwards.
Before all hope evaporates, Hitler surveys a model of the projected rebuilt Berlin - all white Palladian glory - and we feel the preposterousness of his dreams.
Then as news filters in of the worsening military situation, the temper tantrums fly, as one by one he scapegoats his commanders, and unable to admit defeat, edges into
delusion before final acceptance of his downfall. From the quietest moments to the loudest, Ganz remains totally convincing.
His achievement is to make Hitler 'human' in the sense of truly believable, and his rounded portrayal, devoid of any caricature, easily lays claim on the definitive.
Then again Ganz has a huge in-built advantage in being German (well, Swiss actually), as do the rest of the cast. Because
there are no familiar Hollywood faces and everyone is speaking the correct language, the drama is lent a compelling documentary realism that just wouldn't be there if Tom Hanks was
playing Hitler and Robert Duvall Goebbels. Ulrich Matthes, who does play Goebbels, is the next best thing to Ganz himself.
He has the exact sunken eyes and skull face of Goebbels, and as a cut-price carbon copy of his master gives a terrific supporting performance.
His condemnation of the German people in the face of defeat echoes Hitler's and strikes a real chill. And his joint action with
wife Magda (Corinna Harfouch) to murder their children, by first drugging them and then crunching cyanide capsules between their teeth, is unforgettably horrific.
Amongst the monsters there are some more sympathetic characters, such as the dogged general, who protests about the unjust order to
execute him, and is rewarded by being given the defence of Berlin. And Dr Schenck (Christian Berkel), who attempts to dissuade the death
squads and counsels the suicidal as the Russians march up the road. Outside the bunker, in the rubble of the city, there are little wars
fought in microcosm. A twelve-year- old boy, decorated by the Fuhrer for single-handedly destroying two Russian tanks, soon comes to
understand the protests of his distraught father when his friends stop bullets before his eyes. Elsewhere scenes of debauchery and
internecine carnage lend a biblical intensity to Nazism's final collapse. |
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| Throughout the film, director Oliver Hirschbiegel maintains just the right tone of unshowy naturalism, never allowing technique to
get in the way of storytelling. Everything is shot in a workmanlike and very authentic dingy colour that recalls
that other solid and detailed German take on the war: Das Boot. Here is a film that wouldn't dream of entertaining the
pretentiousness of black and white, or step-printed action, or indeed any kind of tricksyness of the image. Similarly it doesn't
flinch from, or attempt to spin the truth of its narrative. It neither sits in judgement nor sermonizes on Nazism, nor does it show
them in an unduly sympathetic light. What it does do is let the horror speak for itself, and the power of its imagery informs our
perception of World War II and makes us better understand the pathology that lay behind it. Downfall is a commanding piece of
cinema, a dark masterpiece that will surely become established as one of the great war films - if not films, period.
© Roger Keen 2005 |
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