Adolf Hitler last meal ravioli, According to "Downfall," one of the last meals Adolf Hitler ate before he killed himself in his Berlin bunker was ravioli. Cheese, of course, for as this painstaking (and sometimes painful) film reminds us, the Führer did not eat meat. Apparently, he enjoyed the ravioli, complimenting the cook who made it and cleaning his plate while his dinner companions, who included his secretary, Traudl Junge, and his lover, Eva Braun, were too preoccupied to do much more than pick at their food and smoke cigarettes.
Their distraction is understandable. The Soviet Army was a few blocks away, and the once-fearsome Nazi military machine had all but collapsed. Hitler's calm demeanor may have been a sign of his own increasingly demented state, as, at least in the movie's rendition of his last days, it came between bouts of raving paranoia and delusional schemes to revive his shattered armies to fight off the advancing Allied forces.
Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, "Downfall" shifts its gaze back and forth between the crumbling military situation on the ground in Berlin and the bizarre domestic situation in the bunker underneath it, combining high wartime drama with a sense of mundane detail that verges on the surreal. It is fascinating without being especially illuminating, and it holds your attention for its very long running time without delivering much dramatic or emotional satisfaction in the end.
At times the German movie, which is one of five finalists for the Academy Award for best foreign film, has the self-conscious intimacy of a behind-the-scenes celebrity portrait. More often, it has the starchy staginess of one of those made-for-cable historical dramas that give actors of reputation (usually British) the chance to put on vintage uniforms and impersonate figures of world-historical importance, either monstrous or heroic.
Bruno Ganz, the fine Swiss-born actor who, in the course of a long career, has tended more toward world-weariness than monstrosity, tackles the biggest monster of them all with appropriate sobriety and a touch of mischief. He does some scenery chewing, and while he looks, at 64, older than Hitler did at 56 (and also kindlier), he has clearly studied Hitler's vocal and physical mannerisms closely.
The challenge Mr. Ganz faces, which Mr. Hirschbiegel, working from a screenplay by Bernd Eichinger, does not quite allow him to meet, is to make Hitler a plausible character without quite humanizing him. To play Hitler is to walk into a paradox. Sixty years after the end of World War II, he continues to exert a powerful fascination: we still want to understand not just the historical background of German National Socialism, but also the psychological and temperamental forces that shaped its leader. At the same time, though, there is still a powerful taboo against making him seem too much like one of us. We want to get close, but not too close.
A few years ago, Menno Meyjes's "Max," a flawed but not dishonorable attempt to explore Hitler's earlier life as a failed artist in Vienna, was widely criticized (often by people who had not seen it) for giving him too much humanity. Curiosity carries with it a sense of moral risk, as if understanding Hitler might be the fateful first step toward liking him.
But of course, millions of Germans - most of them ordinary and, in their own minds, decent people - loved Hitler, and it is that fact that most urgently needs to be understood, and that most challenges our own complacency. Accordingly, the real subject of "Downfall," Mr. Ganz's intriguing, creepily charismatic performance notwithstanding, is not Hitler at all, but rather his followers: the officers, bureaucrats and loyal civilians who were with him at the end.
Some of these are well known, like Eva Braun (Juliane Köhler), the architect Albert Speer (Heino Ferch) and Joseph Goebbels (Ulrich Matthes), who died, along with his wife, Magda (Corinna Harfouch), and their six children, in the bunker with their leader. Other people who figure in this story - which manages to be at once sprawling and claustrophobic - are lesser officers in the SS, and members of Hitler's bodyguard and household staff, including Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara).Together, these characters form a shifting group portrait, and while Mr. Ganz's Hitler is obviously the central figure, he is frequently offstage. Even Eva Braun, who knows Hitler best, confesses that he is ultimately unknowable, and the filmmakers are less interested in exploring the absolute evil he represents than in surveying the behavior of his followers - cowardly, confused, cruel and occasionally brave - as their world collapses.
Apart from a brief prelude set in 1942, "Downfall" takes place at the moment the Nazi project shifted from murder to suicide. In the streets of Berlin, bombarded by Russian artillery, small children wield anti-tank guns, while death squads execute civilians for supposedly collaborating with the Red Army. Hitler, meanwhile, alternates between coolly plotting his own end and denouncing his most loyal lieutenants as traitors. Those around him try to choose among the available choices of flight, surrender or death and wonder at the limits of their own loyalty. The purest - which is to say the most pathological - expression of fidelity comes from Magda Goebbels, who in the film forces ampules of cyanide into the mouths of her sleeping children rather than subject them to the grim prospect of "a world without National Socialism."
The most disturbing aspect of "Downfall" - and the reason it has been attacked in Germany - is the way it allows the audience's sympathy to gravitate toward some of these characters. Next to the Goebbelses, and to Hitler, many of the others don't look too bad. In part, this is a result of the conventions of film narrative, which more often than not invite us to identify with someone on screen, even if nobody is especially admirable.
Thus, General Monke (André Hennicke) starts to look like a crusty, straight-talking old officer out of an American World War II picture, while the open, earnest features of Prof. Ernst-Günther Schenck (Christian Berkel) bespeak an uneasy conscience and a good heart, in spite of the SS lightning bolts on his collar. And Traudl Junge, who Ms. Lara plays with a winning combination of pluck and vulnerability, comes to resemble a Hollywood career girl in a 1940's melodrama.
"Downfall," which was based partly on a memoir Junge wrote with Melissa Müller (and also on the work of the German historian Joachim Fest), seems to accept her image of herself as a naïve young woman drawn to working for Hitler more by "curiosity" than by ideological zeal. As "Blind Spot," an unnerving documentary about Junge (who lived until 2002) makes plain, this curiosity did not extend to what her boss was actually doing. But while "Blind Spot," true to its title, allows you to intuit the layers of denial and selective memory that allowed Junge to live with herself, "Downfall" implicitly affirms her innocence, and extends it to the German people at large. When Goebbels and Hitler refuse to express compassion for their own civilians, and declare that the Germans have brought their fate upon themselves, the movie is sending its domestic audience the soothing message that ordinary Germans were above all the victims of Nazism.
Which is true up to a point, but some distinctions should be preserved. A note at the end reminds us of the 50 million dead in the war and the 6 million Jews slaughtered by the Nazis, and then notes the long lives enjoyed by some of the figures in the film, including Junge and Professor Schenck, whom the movie treats as a hero for becoming disillusioned with Hitler just before the Red Army showed up.
'Downfall'
Opens today in Manhattan.
Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel; written (in German, with English subtitles) by Bernd Eichinger, based on the books "Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich" by Joachim Fest and "Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary" by Traudl Junge and Melissa Müller; director of photography, Rainer Klausmann; edited by Hans Funck; music by Stephan Zacharias; production designer, Bernd Lepel; produced by Mr. Eichinger; released by Newmarket Films. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, South Village. Running time: 155 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Bruno Ganz (Hitler), Alexandra Maria Lara (Traudl Junge), Corinna Harfouch (Magda Goebbels), Ulrich Matthes (Joseph Goebbels), Juliane Köhler (Eva Braun), Heino Ferch (Albert Speer), Christian Berkel (Prof. Ernst-Günther Schenck) and André Hennicke (General Monke).
