Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall: Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down - Page 2

Most reviews have focused on Ganz's performance, discussing the movie in terms of the great-man theory of history that the movie purposely refracts. That purpose is what justifies the movie's epic scale, that it's the story of the nation's downfall at the hands of the man they so enthusiastically followed. Hitler is the vacuum at the collapsing center of their millenial imperial fantasy, which makes Downfall an epic without an epic hero, an epic of deserved defeat.

That's a fascinating concept and the movie gets into trouble only when one of Hitler's more realistic, less fanatical officers threatens to step into the role of hero. Among the candidates are SS-Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein (Thomas Kretschmann), handsome as a matinee idol and married to Eva Braun's (pregnant) sister, who grabs at individual gratification over immolation in the Führer's lost cause, and General der Artillerie Helmuth Weidling (Michael Mendl), who stands up to Hitler's paranoia with an amusingly bluff martial masculinity that we can admire despite the cause it serves.

Most problematic, however, is Prof. Dr. Ernst-Günter Schenck (Christian Berkel), who tries to reduce civilian casualties by, among other things, intervening when M.P.s drag non-military men out of their homes and execute them for "desertion." With Schenck Downfall comes close to making you feel something idiotic like, If only the good Nazis had been in charge. This clearly isn't the filmmakers' intention but the movie's broad scope, which is its central virtue, also poses a narrative problem: Downfall breaks the big story of the end of the Reich into so many individual stories that at times it loses control of their shape. Thus, when Schenck gets medicine for the military surgery out of a German hospital behind the advancing Russian lines, he dodges bullets to reach the hospital gate and then looks both ways before charging in. In other words, his escapade suddenly turns into an act of ordinary war-movie heroism. When you feel yourself hoping he'll pull it off you're likely also to remember he was a high-ranking Nazi; performing a mitzvah for his wounded fellow Nazis should not set us cheering.

Most of the men in the bunker are not candidates for hero, however: some give in drunkenly or orgiastically to fate, some decamp or plan to make deals to save their skins, some display more fervently than ever their faith in Hitler by killing themselves. Unusually for a Second World War movie about Hitler and his entourage, the women's stories are more memorable. Their position is different: they're dependent on the men not just for support and defense but for basic information. Lacking first-hand experience of how far-fetched the propaganda has become the women pick up the negative buzz from the men who have been conditioned by Hitler's intemperateness to avoid straight answers. The men, who know pretty well what's coming, still don't know what's coming next. In this atmosphere even sensible women take on a neurasthenic edge. Their attitudes and emotions lose all middle ground: they're preposterously hopeful or can't imagine a world after defeat.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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