| Product: |
Downfall (DVD) |
| Date: |
10.01.06 (168 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: A really good film about Nazis
Disadvantages: Perhaps a little confusing if you don't know who everyone is
Downfall, made in 2004 in Germany, is a film about the end of the Second World War (in Europe, anyway). It focuses on the battle for Berlin, as Soviet troops move inexorably onwards, and specifically on Hitler in his bunker, as the beleaguered Führer and his henchmen contemplate the end. It’s one of the best recent films I’ve seen.
The film is based on two books. Inside Hitler’s Bunker, by Joachim Fest (an acclaimed historian who’s written several important books about the Third Reich), is a general account of the last few days of the dictator’s life. Until The Final Hour was written by Traudl Junge, one of Hitler’s secretaries, who stayed with him until the end, and is a more personal memoir. I’ve not read either book, but I already knew most of what was going to happen, as the last few days of Hitler’s life exert a powerful fascination on historians, and any biography of Hitler or general history of Nazi Germany is sure to discuss these events in rather greater detail than they discuss almost anything else.
I’d hope that Hitler’s fate is well known enough that it isn’t spoiling anything to say that he dies. It’s also likely that a lot of people know what becomes of Eva Braun and Josef Goebbels. Because I’ve read a lot about the subject, I knew what was going to happen to almost every other character in it. But this didn’t diminish my enjoyment in the slightest. Partly I appreciated how well the film recreated various famous events; partly because the story, although well known, is worth telling.
The film deals with real historical figures, so obviously there’s a certain suspension of disbelief, as few of the actors look all that much like the people they’re playing. The one exception is Bruno Ganz as Hitler, who does a superb impersonation. He gets the look, the posture and the voice absolutely spot on, and he gives an incredibly convincing performance. Just impersonating Hitler would be little more than a party trick (one that Prince Harry would probably enjoy), but Ganz manages to bring the character alive. The mood swings between deluded optimism and fatalistic acceptance seem completely true, and he handles the sudden outbursts of violent fury brilliantly. And you never feel even the remotest shred of pity for him, which is as it should be.
Ganz is the only actor I was familiar with. The rest of the cast do just as well with their (less demonstrative) parts, but often don’t look much like the people they’re supposed to be. There’s grim, fanatical Goebbels and his hysterical wife, nervous Bormann, realist Speer and calculating Himmler, among other less famous personalities. Again, they’re all made convincingly human, but again, with the possible exception of Speer, the audience feels no sympathy for any of them. Eva Braun is a little more ambiguous, as ultimately none of what happens is really her fault, and her desperate attempts at jollity and light-heartedness are rather poignant, but she has, at the very least, closed her eyes to what’s happening around her.
There are characters which deserve to be pitied, primarily the citizens of Berlin, coming under attack from an unstoppable and implacable enemy. The desperate situation of those above ground is frequently compared with the comparative luxury of those in the bunker, and we never forget that when Hitler glibly condemns the German people as deserving to die for having let him down that they’re suffering terribly just a few hundred yards away. There are three main audience identification characters in the film: Traudl Junge, Hitler’s secretary, who shows us what life in the bunker was like, an SS doctor, Schenk, trying desperately to save lives in appalling conditions in a military hospital, and Peter, a young boy who has been conscripted to destroy Russian tanks (he’s one of the few fictional characters in the film, but children really were sent out to fight the Russians towards the end).
Downfall has been controversial for daring to show the Germans as victims, but it’s unrealistic to assume that every German was an evil Nazi who richly deserved what was coming to him. In focusing so much on Traudl and Peter, neither of whom would have been old enough to vote for Hitler in 1933, the film makes the point that not every German was to blame. It’s also been criticised for humanising Hitler and his ministers, but what were they if not human? There’s a comforting tendency to believe that Hitler was mad, or unearthly in some way, or just so plain weird that there could never be another person like him. This is a dangerously complacent view of human nature. Showing Hitler as he was, at least as far as one can, as a man who was kind to his secretaries and loved his dog, but who still came out with repulsive anti-Semitic remarks over the dinner table, is surely a more effective way of exploring the evil at the heart of the Third Reich than if they’d had him, say, raping nuns and strangling kittens.
(I do have a problem with the way Speer is presented. Because Speer was imprisoned for 20 years after the Nuremberg trial, instead of being executed, he was able to present his side of things; as the sole surviving major Nazi minister, there was no one to contradict him. I’ve always thought that his account of his last meeting with Hitler is unrealistic and transparently self-serving. But Downfall presents it exactly as Speer reported it. I suppose things in the bunker at the end were so surreal and screwed up that even a monster like Albert Speer could seem relatively sane in comparison, but I’ve always felt that he’s got off rather lightly as far as history goes.)
Downfall is extremely well made, by Oliver Hirschbiegel, who I hadn’t heard of before. Every detail of the sets and costumes looks authentic, and the frequent use of hand-held camera and minimal use of incidental music gives it an almost documentary feel. This film raises questions – how did things get to this point? what is the source of the extraordinary fanaticism that drives so many characters? how did the Germans end up letting themselves be ruled by this man? These are questions that are still debated, and for the film to raise them, but without being dogmatic about it, is admirable. This is why I’d say Downfall is better than Schindler’s List. Spielberg’s film, with its fancy camera work and black and white photography, doesn’t ask questions, it memorialises (nothing wrong with that, of course; if there’s one thing that really needs to be memorialised, it’s the Holocaust). Downfall, with its more realistic photography and near-documentary feel, doesn’t just replay a bit of history; it forces you to engage with it on some level. Or at least it did with me.
Not that it’s a dry academic exercise, far from it. It’s a wonderful film that can be enjoyed just for the spectacle. There are well-done battle scenes (not as well done as in, say, Band of Brothers, but that might have overbalanced the film). The lunacy of the end of the regime is brilliantly depicted, with orgiastic parties on the one hand, and lynch mobs rounding up and executing ‘traitors’ on the other. The deluded mindset of the leadership is wonderfully evoked when Himmler wonders if he should greet Eisenhower with the Nazi salute, or just a simple handshake. And there are some stunning moments, for instance the shot of an indifferent Hitler surrounded by singing children.
The one criticism is that it can be a bit confusing, with so many characters, most of whom are never identified. It does seem to assume rather a lot of foreknowledge of who everyone was. While it’s certainly good that it doesn’t waste time with clumsy expository dialogue, it might be off-putting to some people that they’re expected to know who, say, Hannah Reitsch was, as the film makes no attempt to explain.
Sorry, this has opinion has gone on way too long. There isn’t a commentary on the film, which is a shame, but there is a second disk of extras. The main one is an hour-long ‘Making of’ documentary, which features interviews with almost all the actors, the director, the writer, and historian Joachim Fest. They talk more about the implications of making the film and the way they felt about it than the nuts-and-bolts film-making side of things, and it’s pretty interesting. There are also two shorter pieces about the shooting if the film, which I found less exciting. You also get brief biographies of major characters, and actor filmographies, and a ‘virtual tour’ of the bunker itself, in which you can look at rooms in the bunker as it was, and then see which scenes in the film were set in those rooms. Pretty but rather pointless. There are cast interviews, but these turn out to be the same interviews that were seen in the documentary, and Traudl Junge’s ghostwriter talks about how she came to work on the book. Not a bad selection of extras, but not a great one either.
My main criticism of the DVD is that the subtitles for the film are for the hard of hearing (unless I’m just being stupid and can’t find out how to replace them with regular English subtitles). This means that subtitles saying things like ‘Music’ and ‘Phone ringing’ often appear, which is a bit distracting. I’m certainly not saying that there shouldn’t be subtitles for the hard of hearing, but they should only be one option.
This film is great. It’s entertaining and thought provoking, and deserves to be seen by everyone. It’s long, at two and a half hours, but it doesn’t drag or outstay its welcome. Although it’s supposed to sell for £19.99, everywhere has it on sale, and it should be easy enough to get for less than a tenner.
Summary: A decent DVD release of a great film
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