Film: Downfall
Release date: 19th September 2005
Certificate: 15
Running time: 149 mins
Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Starring: Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Corinna Harfouch, Ulrich Matthes, Juliane Köhler
Genre: Biography/Drama/History/War
Studio: Momentum
Format: DVD
Country: Germany/Italy/Austria
In films portraying Hitler, representation of the man himself ranges greatly across genres, from comedic parody to the manifestation of evil in the flesh. Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall, however, presents Hitler (Bruno Ganz) in his final hours within the confines of his bunker in Berlin, as Russian tanks lurch ominously towards the last remnants of the Third Reich. There is a man behind the monster, where Hirschbiegel and Ganz as Hitler reveal an uncomfortable and, at times, horrifying portrayal of the worst in human nature, amidst the uncertain chaos in Germany as Nazi rule came to an end.
As the title suggests, Downfall examines the last days of Hitler’s regime in Germany in 1945, and his own being. The account of events comes from Hitler’s final secretary, Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara), a woman who was in the bunker with Hitler, and his closest cohorts, experiencing the horrors therein.
The real-life elderly Junge appears at the beginning and end of the film, adding a sense of historical authenticity to the terrible events that unfold. As Hitler’s secretary, Junge is privy to many of Hitler’s final private moments, including his interaction with his lover, blind follower and eventual wife Eva Braun (Juliane Köhler).
Like the Fuhrer himself, and many of those around him, Braun appears initially in denial that the end is nigh. However, as the Russian tanks continue to roll in to Berlin, Hitler’s despair increases rapidly as his most trusted generals begin to question his strategic sanity. As the terrifying inevitability of the end of the Third Reich becomes clear for its followers, including the grim and icy Joseph and Magda Goebbels (Ulrich Matthes and Corinna Harfouch), Hitler’s brokenness seeps throughout the bunker amidst scenes of death, despair and shocking brutality as Berlin burns outside...
In the midst of events in Downfall, Bruno Ganz’s physically uncanny portrayal of Hitler is unquestionably one of the great film representations of the notorious dictator. For months before filming his role, Ganz reportedly studied recordings of Hitler’s movement and voice, and it shows; authentically showing Hitler’s sudden mood swings from quiet tones to violent outbursts to the involuntary shaking of his hands from the onset of debilitating Parkinson’s disease. This is not the public grandstanding or mythical view of Hitler we have seen numerous times before, but rather a man coming to terms with the fallibility of his own (and a nation’s) God complex, even if it ultimately is something he cannot face up to.
Ganz’s Hitler looks increasingly fragile during his crazed outbursts towards his generals in the bunker, where true to the dictatorial nature of his regime, he cannot accept that the abundance of troops he imagined would combat Allied assault largely exists in his own mind. To emphasise the Fuhrer’s desperate delusions, Hirschbiegel reveals glimpses of Berlin outside the bunker; a city war-torn and scattered with the final stand of surrounded Nazi death squads, and misguided (doomed) members of the Hitler Youth amidst burning debris and human remains.
Downfall is a bleak and inevitably downbeat film, where a deep sense of tragedy and futility pervades throughout in contrast to, say, the crowd pleasing wish-fulfilment of Inglourious Basterds. For instance, when a Nazi general (whom Hitler had at one point sentenced to death upon incorrect accusations of abandoning his post) is promoted to become Berlin’s Commander of Defence, he exclaims: “I would rather have been shot than have this honour.”
There is a very enclosed feel to the film, suitably encapsulating the feeling of Nazi paranoia and panic, as the high command await their fate. There is also a purposeful drabness and dim lighting to the cinematography inside the bunker and the Nazi headquarters, again highlighting extreme levels of Nazi despair and confusion. Indeed, as the bunker begins to shake under the weight of explosions and mortar fire, the supporting characters around Hitler begin to echo his despondency. In one scene, Juliane Köhler’s Eva Braun attempts to dance in a final party in the muted opulence of Nazi headquarters in Berlin, before a Russian bomb explodes directly on top of the building.
For Hitler’s closest followers in Downfall, there is a growing and foreboding sense of a terrible finality to their own existence, where life without the Third Reich and Nazism is simply unimaginable. This is all the more horribly evident in Ulrich Matthes and Corinna Harfouch’s portrayal of Joseph and Magda Goebbels. As two of Hitler’s closest associates, both choose the ultimate destruction of themselves and, most tragically, their children, with a terrible coldness that lives up to their beloved leader’s philosophy that “compassion is for the weak.”
As Hitler’s individual downfall is cemented, Hirschbiegel’s film does not end as one might expect, but rather continues amidst further misery as the young and naive Traudl Junge leaves the bunker in order to cling on to survival. At times, this is an emotionally draining section of the film to watch (as Hirschbiegel intended it to be), where the final death throes of the German military machine and the self-destruction of those within it are shown unflinchingly. Yet Hirschbiegel’s portrayal of Hitler and the fanaticism of Nazism as a whole in Downfall is a brave one. It is much more effective (and frankly more chilling) in the sense that it reveals Nazi followers to be complex and fallible human beings capable of horrendously misguided acts, rather than larger than the life baddies often portrayed in countless Hollywood productions.
With a particularly mesmerising central performance from Bruno Ganz as Hitler, Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall is an unflinching and bleakly enthralling account of the demise of the Third Reich. There is a dark sense of historic intimacy to events in the bunker, where the viewer witnesses the destructive capabilities of human beings and becomes immersed in the shocking true events as they unfold. An exceptionally made German-language film, Downfall has a sense of fearless authenticity that adds to its importance as a study of Hitler and Nazi Germany’s final days. DB
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