The Road To Dunkirk: Downfall
- Jul 19, 2017
- 2 min read
On July 20th Christopher Nolan's WW2 Thriller, Dunkirk, lands in cinemas. To prepare yourselves, and myself, for what will likely be a wholly memorable war film, each day until release I'll be reviewing some of my favourite WW2 films. To close out The Road To Dunkirk, let's take a look at one of the greatest character pieces of all time, Downfall.
April 1945. The Second World War is coming to an end and the man behind it all, Adolf Hitler (Bruna Ganz), hides away in his Berlin bunker, desperately trying to regain control of a war he lost long ago. The Red Army grows closer every day, the sounds of battle grow ever nearer, and the reign of Nazi Germany is coming to an end. As the upper echelons of the Third Reich begin to fall apart Hitler himself struggles to keep things in check. He knows his days are numbered, and all he can do is watch as everything he built falls apart.
To humanize one of the darkest figures in human history, to take a man reviled by almost all of humanity and to make the viewer care. A seemingly impossible task, but one at which Downfall excels. Bruno Ganz gives one of cinemas greatest performances as The Fuhrer. He gives the character so much life and sincerity in everything that he does. It quickly becomes apparent that he isn’t the monster that history has made him out to but is simply a man. He loves his dog, he’s kind to his secretaries and he truly believes in his ideals. As far as he is concerned, everything he does is for the betterment of the German people, even if it means, abandoning civilians in the face of Soviet annihilation. The often parodied scene of Hitler in outrage is in fact one of the single greatest monologues ever filmed, almost Shakespearean in its execution.
Of course, while Hitler is front and centre, he isn’t the only character. A somewhat sympathetic Nazi surgeon (Christian Berkel), Eva Braun (Juliane Kohler), various members of the Hitler Youth and plenty of others. Amongst these is Ulrich Matthes’ Goebels, one of the few wholly evil characters in the movie. He and his wife form the truly despicable and rotten core of the bunker. While the film has been critisized for trying to humanize many of these characters, it instead prefers to focus on the days in which the film takes place, not events that happened years earlier. And for this it deserves praise. Rather than adding to the pile of reasons not to like Nazi’s, it tries to do something no one has ever done before.
Downfall is a sobering reminder that, behind many of the men we have come to hate, to consider monsters, there is nothing more than a man. A man with his own fears, his own beliefs and his own problems. The film achieves the impossible in bringing forth pity and sympathy for those, Hitler included, who wait for the inevitability of death. If that doesn’t make it worth watching, then nothing will.
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