Movie Review: Downfall

9/10

Occasionally a film will come along and totally blow me away on an emotional level.

This is such a film, as was The Lives Of Others, both made in Germany, of all places.

I also, and this is a fact, never cry. I haven't cried at a film in years and years, but I found myself welling up at the end of this wonderful piece of important, and historically relevant, cinema

Don't get me wrong, the lump in my throat does not relate to how the Nazi's were misunderstood geniuses and how I feel sorry for Adolf and Goebbels and all the rest of them. I want to make that absolutely clear straight away.

It was, in fact, because an old woman was admitting that while she wasn't truly a Nazi in her heart, she now felt that she should have tried to find out what was going on outside her bubble and done or felt something about it.

The realisation dawned in my mind that she had lived 60 years with this terrible self-knowledge that at the time she could have been outraged, upset, angry... but she never bothered to see what was truly going on. I found that profoundly moving, so sue me.

The old lady in question is Traudl Junge, Hitlers secretary and one of the people with him in the Berlin Bunker at the time of his self inflicted death in 1945. She was acquitted as being a "young" collaborator (i.e. brainwashed) and did not face the same fates as her employers.

The story of the last days of Hitler and of the German resistance is told from several viewpoints, those of Junge, of a doctor who refuses to leave Berlin with the SS and from that of a young boy, an idealistic Hitler youth.

These viewpoints serve to give us a far more manageable and empathetic story than we are used to and the film's origin in Germany is probably the absolutely crucial factor in its success. The central theme of the movie for me is not "look at the bad men running away from their comeuppance" as is the typical Western Allies thinking, it is a far more important message.

This message is the reason why I loved this film. It is very simple - "we are all human".

Every single person, be it Himmler, Goebbels, even Adolf Hitler himself, is a human being. This may be controversial for some people and I am not unsympathetic to that viewpoint. The Nazis under Hitler and his governemnt commited some of the worst acts ever perpetrated by human beings - you really don't need me to run through them. The film, like me, chooses not to really mention these either, and we are actually momentarily shocked when Hitler dictates his personal "testament" describing how he was proud of taking the Jews head on, and later when his marriage to Eva Braun is delayed by the racial purity tests ("are you of pure Aryan descent?") it's almost blackly comic.

The central reason for this omission of the detail of Nazi atrocities is perfectly in keeping with the realism inherent in the film's story - it is highly doubtful that the German high command went around chatting about the gassing of millions of people, especially during the defence of their own capital.

The humanity of each of the characters in the sense that I am referring to it, is that none of these people were inhuman monsters - deluded, yes.... psychotic, yes.... extremist, yes... but not inhuman. In fact, the factors that led to the rise of national socialism and the atrocities these men were guilty of are not so hard to sympathise with, economic crippling after the first world war by the allies being a huge part of it.

It's an important point I am trying to make, so forgive me if I labour it a bit now. In a movie like, say, Cloverfield, your enemy is not human, they are simply reacting to animal drives that make them amoral killing machines. In contrast, all of the people in Downfall really believe that their cause is what is right and necessary for Germany. They aren't just inhuman monsters. It's very naive to think that a human being is incapable of being just as monstrous as a 50 foot reptile.

For example, Goebell's wife breaks down and wipes out her entire family because she cannot accept a world without National Socialism, and this is the feeling of the characters - their dream has died and there is nothing left to live for. This is no different in my mind, to any deeply held belief system, religious or otherwise - if you truly believe something is right, who are others to say that you are wrong? If the Nazis had (shudder) won the war and succeeded in wiping out the Jewish race, would we still see them as two dimensionally as we tend to? Of course not - we would have been brought up in their way of thinking, or at least to accept their beliefs as a "valid belief structure" as we do with Christianity or Islam, or Scientology for that matter. This is because our understanding of the world is immeasurably coloured by the education and the indoctrination of our youth, as was the youth, such as Junge or the yound boy, Peter, during Hitler's time in Germany.

For this reason we can, while not agreeing with their beliefs, understand what is going through the minds of Frau Goebbels, or the Hitler Youth manning the defences in Berlin who choose to kill themselves rather than be captured or to surrender.

Despite it showing the end of the tyranny of Nazism, Downfall never feels like it has a traditional "happy" ending.

The film never overreaches itself in scale, keeping very much to those individuals' fates that we were introduced to in the opening ten minutes this means we have time to really buy into the characters and see through their eyes, as it were, the death of Nazi Germany.

The acting is absolutely flawless, obviously the main plaudits have to go to Bruno Ganz who, as Hitler is believably the man who turned an entire country mad with anger and rage, yet giving him depth and nuance where it would be so easy to go for shock value. He is kind to his staff, loves his dog and is truly distressed at the destruction of his vision. It's what they used to call a "powerhouse" performance.

Alongside him, his Eva, played by Juliane Kohler, is equally wonderful - totally out of touch with reality at times (she holds a party while Berlin is being bombed, for example), utterly devoted to her love and well aware of her fate it's a part so easy to fail miserably and yet it becomes one of the star attractions.

While these are the obvious standouts, Alexandria Maria Lara as Traudl Junge and especially Ulrich Matthes' Goebbels show that every character can have depth and humanity, however insignificant or monstrous they seem.

It is also a film of moments to remember forever - a boy wakes up in the shell hole he sheltered in overnight, only now seeing that he has slept next to a fresh corpse. After murdering her family, another character sits calmly down to play patience while awaiting her own death and throughout the bombs are falling outside... it's impossible to avoid having these images stay with you.

I haven't given it a ten simply because it's message may well be too much for some to swallow. How can it be so sympathetic to these people for whom history has little mercy or consideration? My personal feeling is that now, in this time of terror and fundamentalism more than ever, this point is relevant and important to remember - however wrong they were in our minds, they believeid they were in the right.

Highly recommended!

A