i do believe Downfall is the best film i have seen this year.
It’s a German film about Hitler and the last days of Nazi Germany seen through the eyes of Hitler’s young secretary, Traudl Junge.
i caught the film with Clement and Evan at Orchard Cineleisure a couple of days ago but the weight of the film is still firmly pressed upon my mind. If you know me to be the movie buff i am, not many, if rarely, do films have such an effect on me. It ranks up there with The Incredibles and Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi as the best films of the year so far but wins out for the sheer complexity of its subject matter.
Of course, Robert Rodriguez and Sin City might just dazzle enough to wrest the title away but we’ll see.
i wait with bated breath.
i thought it was phenomenal that a German director and cast was responsible for a film dealing with Hitler and Nazi Germany. It added to the poignancy of the film and added to its realism. If i remember reading correctly, it’s one of the first films to have touched on the topic of Nazi Germany through the perspective of a German director and an all-German cast.
The film is as mentioned before mostly seen through the eyes of Traudl Junge, which leads me to believe that most of the action in the film was based on her eyewitness account, and presumably those who were present in the bunker in which Hitler spent his last days. This belief is supported by the screening of an interview with the real Traudl Junge at the end of the film and the unflinching and unsympathetic portrayal of Hitler and the people around him in the film.
If this is so, Downfall would truly be a seminal piece of cinema because of the truth that it boldly proclaims and presents to the audience.
i believe the greatest impression left upon the audience would be how human Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and other Nazi personnel seemed to be. Rightly so, since they were people after all. i would suppose that most people would only have a vague idea, at best, of Hitler the person and probably paint him and Nazi Germany with a single brushstroke of pure, monolithic evil.
Yet, the great work of this film and the actors who portrayed the various characters is that audiences get to catch a glimpse of the humanity of Hitler and his followers.
We don’t see Hitler the poster boy for human evil but we see a man who was polite to and appreciative of his personal staff.
We don’t see Hitler the hynoptic demagogue but we see a man who truly inspired the people around him with his ideals of National Socialism.
We don’t see Hitler the ruthless conqueror of Europe but we see a man obssessed with vegetarian meals and desperate for the loyalty of his generals and leaders.
We don’t see Hitler the rabid anti-Semite and butcher of six million Jews but we see a man broken by ultimate failure and laying the blame on anything and anyone he could think of and dying as ignoble and ignominous a death as one can possibly imagine.
Yet the film ends with the a list of crimes perpetrated by Hitler and Nazi Germany.
It is poignant but not sympathetic to Hitler nor the Germans that made up Nazi Germany.
And that perhaps is the most forceful and frightening message of Downfall.
The face of evil is all too human, whether we are comfortable with admitting it or not.
The interesting thing is that the film juxtaposes the active evil of Hitler and Goebbels with the passive evil of “young followers” like Traudl Junge.
In the interview at the end of the film, Traudl shares her reflections about the part she played in that dark period of German and world history. She said that at first she was quite relieved to know that her support for Hitler and Nazi-ism was mitigated by her ignorance of such crimes as the Jewish genocide. But she realised to her dismay that being young and being ignorant was no excuse. She could have made an effort to find out.
That was the singular most powerful statement in the film.
And it brought to mind this quote by British statesman, Edmund Burke,
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
This is utterly in keeping with Biblical truth. The world is in darkness and if those who have the light, that is the people of God, refuse to shine and bring the light to those who in darkness, the world will remain bleakly dark.
Yet, as the film amply demonstrates, the one who remains in darkness though there be light to dispel it is culpable.
i love that the film, though unsympathetic to Hitler and Nazi Germany, does not give us the opportunity to climb up onto our moral high horses and rail in condemnation against a monolithic and ultimately faceless idea of evil.
i love that it forces us, through its portrayal of Hitler and Traudl, to look at ourselves in the mirror and consider what evil really is.
