Of all the dark places of the twentieth century, Steven Spielberg has shown us the darkest: when he took the camera inside the gas chamber in “Schindler’s List,” he broke one of the last taboos in historical filmmaking. Even though now there seems to be an entire industry devoted to movies about World War II, no major film had yet shown us the other black hole of death and destruction at the very center of Western Europe’s greatest conflagration. “Downfall” takes us into the Führerbunker, the Berlin underground fortress where the architects of the Holocaust met their grim end.
In his 2002 film “Das Experiment,” Oliver Hirschbiegel used a fictional version of the Stanford Prison experiment as harrowing metaphor for the Third Reich. In “Downfall,” the filmmaker goes straight to the historical precedent. Hirschbiegel and writer/producer Bernd Eichinger (“Nowhere in Africa”) paint a sprawling, hellish canvas of the fall of Berlin, and they give us the claustrophobic drama inside the Führerbunker in the days surrounding Hitler’s April 1945 suicide.
Over the course of its epic 150 minutes, “Downfall” follows several more or less sympathetic characters, including a boy (Donevan Gunia) who defies his father to defend the city and a doctor (Christian Berkel) who stays behind to help the wounded. But the film’s focus is Traudl Junge, the subject of the 2002 documentary “Blind Spot.” Still a young woman, Junge was Hitler’s secretary and took down his last will. “Downfall” opens when Junge, played by Alexandra Maria Lara, is hired, and ends with her escape. In the film’s epilogue, the real Junge questions her own innocence in a clip cribbed from “Blind Spot.”
Enter, through a phalanx of guards, generals, and yes-men in SS uniforms, Adolf Hitler. The great Swiss actor Bruno Ganz (“Wings of Desire”) is simply stunning in the role of history’s most cursed monster. Bent and shaky from Parkinson’s Disease, nervously slapping the famous part out of his eyes, he addresses his secretary with the charm of a stodgy uncle--just to wheel around and throw an incredible tantrum, barking and shaking his fists like, well, Adolf Hitler in a newsreel. The film gains much of its effectiveness from Ganz’s uncanny impersonation.
