"Downfall"

This German film about Hitler's last days is so powerful and compelling, you may actually find yourself feeling sorry for Der Fuhrer.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Feb 21, 2005 | About two-thirds of the way through the momentous new German film "Downfall," there comes a moment when you realize how completely you have entered its world. It's a scene made infamous by newsreel footage: the last public appearance of Adolf Hitler, who emerges from his hideaway, blinking like a lizard, in the final days of the war to hand out medals to the "soldiers" defending Berlin from the Allies, most of them boys of around 11 to 14.

Most of "Downfall" takes place downstairs, in the legendary bunker beneath the Reich Chancellory in Berlin, where Der Führer spent his last weeks before taking his own life. A few days after that last photo op in the building's courtyard, Soviet troops would arrive there to find -- as the world would learn decades later -- the incinerated remains of Hitler and Eva Braun in a shallow pit. But on this occasion the Allied bombers and artilleries have taken a break, the courtyard is bright with spring sunlight, and the dictator is trying to fulfill his propaganda role. After what seems an eternity in that fluorescent-lit, steel-lined basement full of doomed and drunken Nazis, the scene feels like a picnic painted by Matisse.

As played by Bruno Ganz in a heart-stoppingly convincing performance, Hitler may be deranged, but he's no idiot. For all his bluster, he knows the end of the Thousand-Year Reich is very near; he emerges from the bunker as hunched and pallid as Quasimodo, his crippled left hand curled up and twitching behind his back. He tries to play the role of the cocksure demagogue who conquered Europe for these terrified boys who are facing death in his name, but he's really not up to it. He mumbles at them, grips their cheeks with his one almost-good hand, tells them he wishes his Wehrmacht generals -- who have been defeated on every front -- had half their courage. God help me, I felt sorry for him. Look at the poor guy, I was thinking. He's suffering so much.

Is that obscene? I suppose it is, but it's also the power of drama at work. Sure, Hitler was a monster, but in Ganz's portrayal -- the most compelling, and most wretched, Hitler I have ever seen or ever hope to -- he's a recognizably human one. As one friend of mine has suggested, self-pity is one of the greatest of human sins, and Hitler's prodigious self-pity motivated him to epic heights of megalomania. When we recognize him, in Ganz's shuffling, gray-jowled homunculus, as an especially pathetic example of our own species, when we forget for a second all our valid reasons for despising him and casting him out and instead look on him with compassion -- that is the triumph, albeit momentary, of art over history.

We need both art and history to make any sense of a phenomenon like Hitler, and don't think for a second that "Downfall," which is the first German feature film made about the Nazi regime in almost 40 years, tries to equivocate or make any apologies for the Third Reich. Based on the best-selling book by historian Joachim Fest ("Inside Hitler's Bunker"), which accumulates all that is known about the dictator's final days, as well as the memoir of Hitler's young secretary, Traudl Junge, the film compacts the story of all the regime's nightmarish madness into a portrayal of its last 12 days. Filmed on an extraordinary four-walled set that reconstructs the bunker as closely as possible, "Downfall" -- directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel from a script by Bernd Eichinger -- has a claustrophobic, pulse-accelerating realism that deliberately recalls Wolfgang Petersen's "Das Boot," still the greatest German-made film about World War II.

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