Film: Dawn Of Evil – Rise Of The Reich
Release date: 28th February 2011
Certificate: 18
Running time: 106 mins
Director: Urs Odermatt
Starring: Tom Schilling, Gotz George, Wolf Bachofner, Simon Schwarz, Anna Unterberger
Genre: Biography/Drama/History
Studio: Revolver
Format: DVD
Country: Austria/Germany/Switzerland
The life of Adolf Hitler is endlessly fascinating, and director Urs Odermatt’s 2009 historical drama about Hitler’s formative years in Vienna is one of many films to focus on the Nazi dictator. In recent years, we have seen the final days of Hitler in director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s intense 2004 drama Downfall, but Dawn Of Evil - Rise Of The Reich looks at a very different Hitler; an aspiring young artist whose struggle for recognition leaves him frustrated and dangerously unhinged.
In Vienna, Hitler (Tom Schilling, who played a minor role in The Baader Meinhoff Complex) moves into a dilapidated boarding house, where he is befriended by an old Jewish man, Schlomo Herzl (Gotz George), who ekes out a living selling bibles on the streets. Though insecure in some ways, the young Hitler has an arrogant self-regard when it comes to his command of spoken language and his more questionable artistic skills.
Rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, and struggling to support himself, Hitler falls in with a group of anti-Semitic bigots, and sets about winning over a nubile young servant girl called Gretchen (Anna Unterberger), who is fond of standing naked at her window platting her hair when she is not having sex with the elderly Schlomo.
After much hand-wringing, Hitler eventually abandons his artistic ambitions and turns his attention to politics, a pursuit he clearly has more talent for…
Hitler has been portrayed in many films since the end of World War 2, but director Urs Odermatt’s 2009 historical drama about Hitler’s formative years in Vienna is unlikely to be remembered as one of the best films about the Nazi dictator, if at all. It may be a little unfair to compare Dawn Of Evil - Rise of The Reich with Downfall, director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2004 drama about Hitler’s final days, but where Downfall was mesmerising and intense, Urs Odermatt’s film is tedious and laboured.
The best thing to be said about Dawn Of Evil - Rise Of The Reich is that it is a well acted and well shot film. In just about every other respect, it is a resounding failure. Perhaps the film’s biggest flaw is its screenplay; an ungainly mix of drama that is lacking in dramatic tension or believable character development, and moments of poorly conceived comedy that fall horribly flat. It’s not that Hitler and comedy can’t mix, as the likes of Mel Brooks and Spike Milligan have shown, but in the context of Dawn Of Evil - Rise Of The Reich, the comedy is just plain bad. In one mystifyingly preposterous, incompetently shot scene, a distraught Hitler tries to hang himself from a bridge but ends up swinging from the rope, the noose caught under his armpits. It’s absurd, certainly, but in a way that makes you wonder what on earth the filmmakers were thinking, not in a way that anybody over 5 years of age will find amusing.
To be fair, there is a certain dry humour to the scene in which Hitler shows Schlomo his paltry art works, enthusing over his dubious talent and listing titles that frequently make mention of ‘twilight’, when so such effect is visible, but it comes across as a cheap gag given what we know about Hitler’s lack of artistic talent and thwarted ambitions. There are times when the dialogue is so excruciatingly overwrought that it’s unclear whether Odermatt is aiming for an absurd parody of serious biopics, and failing, or just being pretentious.
Hitler’s transformation from delusional struggling artist to spittle-flecked fascist is both tediously drawn out and remarkably unconvincing. Dawn Of Evil - Rise Of The Reich seems to want us to believe that drinking beer with a raw meat-eating paedophile and a couple of sneering thugs is enough of a catalyst to set in motion the madness of a man who will turn to mass genocide.
The truly bizarre love triangle involving Hitler, Schlomo and Gretchen is equally unconvincing. Gretchen is initially presented as an independent free spirit who for some reason is drawn to the withered old Schlomo, ostensibly because he is such a good storyteller, though the film offers absolutely no evidence of this, other than his claims that he is writing a book. Hitler, once his curiosity about ‘intercoursing’ and fellatio has been sparked, then moves in to wrest her away from Schlomo, but is harshly rebuffed. Except, then he isn’t, and very soon Gretchen is remodelled as some kind of proto-Nazi ice maiden. Has Hitler given her an early form of Rohypnol? Has she been hypnotised by his vapid chatter about beauty and art? Who knows, but it’s just one of many questions that is left hanging in the air in this odd, mystifyingly mixed up film.
Dawn Of Evil - Rise Of The Reich is a missed opportunity to tell the story of Hitler’s early years. Where it could have offered insight, it comes across like an unintentionally surreal soap opera about a failed artist, as filmed by a failed director. JG
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