Downfall
by Oliver Hirschbiegel
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DVD details
Actor: Alexandra Maria Lara, Bruno Ganz, Corinna Harfouch, Juliane K?hler, Ulrich MatthesDirector: Oliver Hirschbiegel
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Subtitled); German (Original Language); Russian (Original Language)
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.78:1
Running Time: 155 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-08-02
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Sony Pictures
DVD Reviews of Downfall
DVD Review: A few interesting addenda to the fine lead reviews
Summary: 5 Stars
This film alone makes worthwhile all the work it took to learn fluent German. The subtitles are probably about as good as what I could have done, but subtitles and dubbing never quite convey all that is in the original script language. "Sie werden ersaufen in ihrem eigenen Blut!" is translated as "They will drown in their own blood!" The script departed from the usual German word order that parks most verbs (after the first) on the end of the sentence, thus: "Sie werden in ihrem eigenen Blut ersaufen!" This might have been because it underscores Hitler's well-known mastery of squeezing every bit of feeling from his listeners -- he ends the sentence not with the three-syllable word for "drown" but with the potent monosyllable "BLOOD!" Hitler's gift for expression is also manifest in "Ersaufen" instead of the usual "ertrinken" for "drown." "Ersaufen" is a vulgar or less polite way of saying "ertrinken," akin to the better-known replacement of the more polite "essen" for "eat" with "fressen" to describe how animals eat, perhaps the equivalent of "gobble up" or "wolf down." Instead of "trinken" for "drink," "saufen" is more like "guzzle." German, in its agglutinative way, then tacks "er-" on the front to indicate that the action leads to death, so "ertrinken" means "drown" and "ersaufen" is to drown disgustingly or wretchedly. Of course, translators of movie scripts can't get sidetracked into such linguistic intricacy, so "They will drown in their own blood!" is the only reasonable subtitle here, but it does leave out something underscoring that Hitler's facility with language was with him until the end.
Some of the actors besides Ganz looked a great deal like the actual characters they played: Goebbels, Himmler, and Keitel, for instance. However, the ramrod-straight and slender Jodl would not have recognized himself in this film. This was perhaps okay with less well-known characters such as Krebs and Burgdorf, but one of my few (and very minor) quibbles with this film is that it might have worked harder to depict Jodl (and Speer).
To see extensive interviews done 35 years ago with Speer (crafty enough to avoid the N?rnberg neck-stretching accorded to Jodl and Keitel, who didn't shoot themselves as did Krebs and Burgdorf), and especially with a much younger Traudl Junge, and others who recalled the final days in the F?hrerbunker, get or rent "The World at War (30th Anniversary Edition) (1974)," quite a bargain for 22 hours of video that combines well with "Downfall" in helping understand the events, if it is possible to begin to understand a world gone mad, especially this country gone mad.
Incidentally, in all of Hitler's ravings in this film, other than nuances such as using "ersaufen" instead of "ertrinken," Hitler never uses profanity or obscenities. At one point, someone asks "What do you expect from a non-smoking vegetarian teetotaler?" Hitler and the Nazis tried to promote a healthy lifestyle, and it was in reaction to associations with Nazism that Germany (with the help of a few well-placed research funding incentives from US tobacco companies) has been one of the last European countries to begin to enact laws against smoking in restaurants and public buildings, with one of the highest rates of smoking among women in the world.
I must especially underscore one reviewer's remarks that seeing the sympathetic side of Hitler (Traudl Junge once said that of all the bosses she had in her life, he was the kindest to her) somehow emphasizes the horror in the man and the movement. As Jacob Bronowski says in the "Ascent of Man" sequence where he sifts through his fingers Auschwitz dust that might contain particles of his close relatives, this is what comes of thinking your way is the only way.
DVD Review: A Warning That Never Goes Out Of Style
Summary: 5 Stars
Some people in Germany have accused this movie of attempting to "make harmless" the crimes of the Third Reich. This couldn't be further from the truth, and I'll explain why.
Bruno Ganz plays Hitler the man. Hitler the man who loves his dog, who is nice to his secretary, who loves his friends and spits at the people he thinks betray him, who tells those he cares about to save themselves even as he prepares to take cyanide, shoot himself, and then be burnt. This is a guy who, as long as he's not talking about the Jews or world domination, wouldn't be that hard to live with.
HOWEVER, this is still Hitler the monster. Being a vegetarian doesn't absolve him of being directly responsible for the deaths of millions or for throwing the entire world into war. Hitler the two-dimensional monster is inseparable from Hitler the three-dimensional man, and that is what this movie reminds us every time it makes you feel sorry for him even though you know, and the movie reminds you, that he was a monster.
All monsters in history--past, present, and future--were and are and will be human beings. We like to imagine Hitler as being some sort of inhuman monster, but he was only human. Far too human. That is why this movie makes people uncomfortable; it reminds them that any 'gee he seems like a nice fellow' leader of men could turn out to be a monster if the right questions are never asked or the ideas never challenged. The warning is an uncomfortable one: you cannot trust any ideologue on face value.
Not a single one, ever.
And /that/ is the real import of this movie, if "Never Again" is to have any sort of real meaning beside a catchphrase. Were I a history teacher, I would show this movie followed by /Schindler's List/. Both are equally true, and equally important sides of the story: all this horror is from mere humans borne.
DVD Review: All War,No Peace
Summary: 4 Stars
I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be German. To rule the world and lose that position. Hitler, little do I know, did a lot of wrong things but he did a lot of right to lead men with enough armor in their hearts to fight the world. The Russians were kept at bay. Germany alone did everything and then there was "Der Untergang" ... Stunning storyline, sometimes or better known as history. Sigh. There's so much more to learn in life than how shoes lose their souls or soles, whichever you prefer.
I love the way the soldies, german soldiers, have an attitude of nonchalance as if nothing can possibly go wrong and they go about taking orders like they always have. So used to drudgening every possible enemy. I like that side of them. I like that side of humanity.
Downfall is a good film. I thought it would have ended when Hitler gives away. Rather than showing what happened to individual characters, if I was the director, I'd show what happened to the world than these few character names I would forget in a hurry.
I do not know German. I want to. Now.
DVD Review: Ist keine Entschuldigen
Summary: 5 Stars
Oliver Hirschbiegel "Downfall" is one of the most best written, directed, and acted films I've ever seen. It's also one of the most disturbing. Prefaced and concluded by excerpts from an actual interview with Trudl Junge, a young Bavarian woman who joined Hitler's secretarial pool in late 1942 and who was in the Fuhrerbunker when he killed himself, the film focuses on the last ten days of Hitler's life.
All of the characters one would expect to see in such a story are present. But Hirschbiegel and screenwriter Bernd Eichinger break away from the stereotypes of them as evil incarnate to present them as complexly tragic figures too. None of the key figures are morally exonerated; they come across all too often as truly brutal creatures who deserve the strongest condemnation. But we also see them as creatures who exhibit vestiges of humanity: Bruno Ganz's Hitler can be distantly caring in private even though a monster when in his role as leader; Magda Goebbels is a Nazi fanatic, but one can't help feel a bit of compassion for her mixed with revulsion when she poisons her children (the scene when the eldest daughter resists the "medicine" is heartbreaking); Eva Braun's inability to quite grasp what's happening, a characteristic of her shallow personality as much as the confusion of the final days, is both horrifying and infuriating, but also somehow touching. In short, the characters breathe, and help the viewer to go beyond one-dimensional stereotypes. Moreover, the film gives a good and chilling impression of the anarchy that broke out in Berlin as the Russian Army closed in: zealous diehard Nazis executing civilian Berliners in last-ditch attempts at "order"; children impressed into the Home Guard; ragged and starving civilians scrambling for a tin of food; SS officers committing suicide rather than surrendering; and ordinary soldiers, stripped of hope, drinking themselves into oblivion. The lessons are plain: war doesn't end neatly and cleanly. The evil wrought by warmakers such as Hitler doesn't die with them.
The visuals of the film are also superb. The Fuhrerbunker is stark, straight-lined, monochromatic, but also decorated with the occasional tacky bourgeois knicknack loved by Hitler. The blasted Berlin streets are desolating to see. The crowded underground scenes make one claustrophic.
In the interview at the film's end, Traudl Junge says that until a certain point in her post-war life, she was unable to see herself as in any way personally implicated in the horrors wrought by Hitler. She was, after all, just a secretary. But then one day she passed a monument to Sophie Scholl, the schoolgirl executed before the war for her "White Rose" resistance to the Nazis. Junge realized with a shock that Sophie and she were born in the same year. Then, Junge tells us, it came to her: even youth is no excuse--"ist keine Entschuldigen"--for either active collaboration or nonresistance to evil.
Highly recommended.
DVD Review: Absolutely mesmerizing.
Summary: 5 Stars
I enjoy foreign films & am also a bit of a history buff. In the past few years I've been amazed by the quality of films coming out of Germany, & this one was particularly good. (Actually, I've always enjoyed German films, but it seems we don't get a lot of them in the U.S.) Bruno Ganz gives an amazing performance. Some may feel that it is a sympathetic portrayal, but that's not my reaction. I believe it gives a bit of a perspective on how an entire population might have been swayed by Hitler's personality, but it also reveals many of his weaknesses/idiosyncrasies/faults/pathologies. He was, after all, a human being, & this movie does show a human side to a man that orchestrated atrocities beyond comprehension. I recommend this movie as not only excellent cinema but as a reminder of history & a cautionary tale about charismatic figures.
Description of Downfall
The riveting subject of Downfall is nothing less than the disintegration of Adolf Hitler in mind, body, and soul. A 2005 Academy Award nominee for best foreign language film, this German historical drama stars Bruno Ganz (Wings of Desire) as Hitler, whose psychic meltdown is depicted in sobering detail, suggesting a fallen, pathetic dictator on the verge on insanity, resorting to suicide (along with Eva Braun and Joseph and Magda Goebbels) as his Nazi empire burns amidst chaos in mid-1945. While staging most of the film in the claustrophobic bunker where Hitler spent his final days, director Oliver Hirschbiegel (Das Experiment) dares to show the gentler human side of der Fuehrer, as opposed to the pure embodiment of evil so familiar from many other Nazi-era dramas. This balanced portrayal does not inspire sympathy, however: We simply see the complexity of Hitler's character in the greater context of his inevitable downfall, and a more realistic (and therefore more horrifying) biographical portrait of madness on both epic and intimate scales. By ending with a chilling clip from the 2002 documentary Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary, this unforgettable film gains another dimension of sobering authenticity. --Jeff ShannonGeneral DVDs
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