Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall: Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down - Page 4

At times Köhler's Eva is as high-spirited as that irrepressible good-time gal Thelma Todd playing a gangster's moll in the Marx Brothers' Monkey Business. She rounds out the unreality of this imperial court that can't both adjust for the fact that it's been forced underground and maintain its identity. So when Hitler denies Eva's tearful plea to revoke Fegelein's execution for desertion, she accepts the decision because, even buried alive, he's still the Führer. The Eva Braun of Downfall, a semi-tragic, semi-camp Persephone, isn't the relentlessly chipper hostess from hell, she's the relentlessly chipper hostess of hell.

Magda Goebbels, by contrast, is the stony, grim embodiment of the impact of Nazi ideology on civilians, even its most ardent adherents. The moviemakers blessedly realize that the insanity of the six blond Goebbels moppets singing in chorus in the bunker, or moping because they want to say hello to Uncle Adolf, doesn't require any stylistic enhancement. (They're like little lost souls cast as the von Trapp children in a death-chamber version of The Sound of Music.) Nor does the movie use their "innocence" or blondness or singing voices to bring out the horror of their murder at the hands of a mother who can't bear to think of them growing up in a world without National Socialism. The plain facts are bad enough: Magda drugs her children, including the oldest girl who has to be forced to drink the potion because she knows what's up; then as they sleep she places a glass vial of cyanide between their teeth and presses their jaws until it breaks with a little crunch. The movie replicates Magda's sinister efficiency by showing her go through the process with every single child, without elision. Those misbegotten children could not have a more effective memorial.

This kind of literalness makes Downfall inevitably lumbering because of its scope and because it chooses a humanely empathic rather than an ironic approach to its anti-epic ambitions. (As much as the movie accomplishes, it is also true that it's hard to keep track of who's who among the Nazi officials and that the civilians' stories are much less individuated.) Hirschbiegel shoots the massive confluence of stories from an overview that can take in, without jarring shifts, Hitler and his followers (the morally dead waiting for physical extinction) and the people who pinned their hopes on them and so in one sense got what they deserved (that's Hitler's view at the end) but in another sense got what no civilians deserve, an onslaught they're not permitted to surrender to.

At the same time, Hirschbiegel lets the irony speak for itself and his unemphatic handling permits a surprising amount of comedy to spring out of the material without diminishing or distorting its other implications. Because of Hirschbiegel's broad engineering of his subject Ganz doesn't have to stretch for the laughs. Simply by reference to the information you gather from his officers' gossip, and from your knowledge of history and familiarity with period newsreel footage, you find yourself laughing out loud at how uncomfortably overscaled Hitler's podium style of ranting is in the cramped rooms of the bunker, at his kvetching that the Germans brought defeat on him rather than the reverse, and especially at his denial of the rapidly-encroaching military reality.

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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