“Downfall,” German director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s epic portrayal of the last days of the Nazi high command, is both grimly fascinating and morally repellent.
The 2 1/2-hour movie taps into our gruesome curiosity about what took place in the bunker as the Russian army approached Berlin in April 1945 and extinguished Hitler’s dream of a Thousand-Year Reich.
The party is over, the bill has come due and now the booze is really flowing, as Hitler rants and his minions plan their suicides or escapes.
But the filmmaker’s decision to focus on the war’s endgame without conveying the breadth and depth of despicable Nazi acts that led to this state of affairs is a major miscalculation.
Hitler and his underlings are depicted as unrepentant officers and bureaucrats in need of a moral compass. If they dread capture and trial, it’s not because they sanctioned the murders of Jews but because they want to avoid the ignominy of losers.
“Downfall,” which had its local premiere in January in the Goethe-Institut’s “Berlin & Beyond” series, opens Friday, March 11 at the Clay in San Francisco. It opens March 18 at the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, the Century Empire in San Francisco, the Albany Twin in Albany and the Century Five Theatre in Pleasant Hill.
For his source material, Hirschbiegel relied on Joachim Fest’s “Inside Hitler’s Bunker” and Traudl Junge’s “Until the Final Hour.” Junge, the subject of the 2002 documentary “Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary,” saw a kinder, gentler side of Hitler than did his generals.
“Downfall” was attacked by some commentators when it opened in Germany last year for taking its cue from Junge, and daring to present Hitler as a person rather than a caricature.
Bruno Ganz plays Hitler as weakened and tormented, but also volatile, lunatic and out of touch with reality. It’s a fine performance that locates the man inside the monster, but is not in the least intended to elicit sympathy.
Any possible doubt about Ganz or Hirschbiegel’s motives is erased when Hitler savagely declares that he is most proud that he “rid the German lands of Jewish poison.”
Oddly, that is one of only a couple of references to the Final Solution. The argument the film presents for Hitler’s criminal derangement isn’t his annihilation of Jews but his refusal to surrender although the war is clearly lost.
His stubbornness means the deaths of thousands of boys and elderly men, the only “soldiers” left to defend Berlin against battle-hardened Russian troops, as well as countless civilians. But Hitler feels no sympathy for his people, whom he denounces for letting him down.
Hirschbiegel cuts from the claustrophobia and gloom of the bunker to the rubble-filled streets, where various subplots illustrate the cost of Hitler’s order to fight on. It is no accident that the only men of character, a brave doctor and a clear-eyed field officer, are found outside the bunker.
“Downfall” is well worth seeing, but it doesn’t provide the catharsis of old-fashioned war movies where the Nazis get their just reward. Just as slasher films leave the audience unsettled, wondering if the maniac has been finished off or may strike again, Hirschbiegel doesn’t want viewers leaving in a state of complacency.
As a coda and a warning, he uses an excerpt from “Blind Spot” in which Junge chastises herself for not being more cognizant of what Hitler was up to. She was apolitical, like many young people today, to her everlasting regret.