Charles Chaplin's low-comedy assault on Hitler in The Great Dictator attacked not just the man but the humorlessness of his political mania. Chaplin made it seem as if laughter was inherently on the side of freedom. The World War II-era Donald Duck short Der Fuehrer's Face roused horse laughs at Hitler's expense as a rude, morale-building response to the Nazis' barbaric saber-rattling. By contrast, the laughter at Ganz's Hitler in Downfall has a quality of informed historical judgment (what Chaplin lacked in the self-serious speech he ended The Great Dictator with), of justness. Some of it is exquisitely understated.

Downfall does attempt more extreme forms of style, particularly in a few Masque-of-the-Red-Death party scenes, and falls short. At first I found myself wishing for the extroverted sensuality of Bernardo Bertolucci's fascist-era Conformist, but I ended up grateful for Hirschbiegel's prosaic approach to this complicated material because it leaves your mind freer to make connections. (The story of The Conformist ties the protagonist's repressed homosexuality to his fascist collaboration and as such doesn't bear much thinking about. Style is all, and in that luscious instance it's plenty.) The situation in Downfall, both in the bunker and above ground, where in April 1945 Nazi heroism maintains its appeal only for children who don't understand the meaning of their oaths to fight the Russian tanks to the last bullet, is grotesque enough without emphasis. Downfall does its best not to seduce you in familiarly movieish ways.

The Nazi M.P.s in Downfall with their last-stand mentality are thus treated very differently from the patrols hunting deserters in Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain (click here for my review), with that violet-eyed albino leading the malevolent pack. This comparison brought out for me the extent of Hirschbiegel's tact. Downfall is what Cold Mountain might be like if Minghella had respected the impact of war on civilians enough to forgo all the literary guff. When Traudl emerges from the bunker disguised as a disarmed soldier and a little boy grabs her hand, enabling her to sneak past the Russians, you sense that her story almost can't help taking on a romance form--the symbolic purification of a tainted soul. But Hirschbiegel throughout refuses to let the movie cohere around Traudl, the most sympathetic figure.

Thus, Downfall can't be said to romanticize a fallen empire as Gone With the Wind does (click here for my review) despite its perfectly frank view of Scarlett's morals (not just her man-stealing but her use of convict labor to rebuild her demesne after the war, for instance). Gone With the Wind is Scarlett's romance--her series of quests as the ground shifts under her, and her temptations along the way--and that pulls everything in its train. (As wrongheaded as she may be, if you're not going to root for Scarlett you may as well leave the theater.) Hirschbiegel appends the interview footage of the actual Traudl's self-castigating comments as if to limit the romance the movie gives rise to, just in case. Hirschbiegel does not have total control over the shape of his movie and his skills aren't always perfectly apt, but any moviemaker who knows not to trust himself, who gives history the last word over fiction in order to counteract the pull of romance, is some kind of hero.