Mishalak Reviews: Downfall

On Tuesday I got the opportunity to go see Downfall for free at a local theater. Being a free showing I was worried about showing up too late to get a seat, but I should not have been. It was a cold evening so the theater was not packed as it might have been otherwise. Or perhaps the prospect of a subtitled film all in German doesn't turn people out like I thought it would.

Now I'm going to go a-dancing in the minefield because I can't review a movie that worked so hard to recreate a time without commenting about what I think about that time a little bit and I'm likely to do more than a little. And the times portrayed are those of the Nazis, the great specters that hung over the 20th century and how we view everything in it so there are sure to be people who violently disagree with me.

I would not call this an intimate portrait as so many others have. It seems rather to be closely following around some of the few who survived and seeing what they see. It also is a movie with almost no art direction; it was all in a cold style without careful camera shots to make it more cinemagraphic and force particular emotions. I don't see how anyone could reasonably say this was too sympathetic to Hitler though. We get to see the dictator in some of his worst moments when the façade of reasonableness was completely breaking down and he shows himself to be a small and selfish man among other things. It seems to show Hitler as he was, a man who could be very charming who's aberrant views had been so long isolated from correction by reality that he started to believe his own propaganda. Also how people can make like the situation is normal even when everything is falling apart around them.

I think it very likely those who say it humanizes the Nazis too much are themselves promoting the propaganda of Nazi as absolute evil. Which is natural, after all we see here on screen the ranting and claims that Jews are absolutely evil, a pestilence that must be totally eliminated, so it is no wonder that some of them would turn that around upon their persecutors. But it is also dangerous because if we associate Nazi with absolute evil we can let ourselves be lead by this to reject perfectly reasonable things (for example animal rights, yep I'm not kidding the Nazis forbade animal vivisection while they planned the extermination of nations).

Personally I think it important that we see that it is people who can be so ordinary, so common, and how they are quite reasonable in person while in public making statements calling for the death of whole peoples. It is a lesson to us all through the eyes of people who were there how it is easy to be caught up in group think and how our natural virtues like loyalty become mad vices when in the hands of people doing evil.

All the same I can't in good conscience order people to go see this as some sort of political duty. The film will mostly be of interest to people wishing to get a two and a half hour history the end of the Nazi regime. It doesn't provide any more insight into what it was really all about than what a person brings to the movie. There is no "ah-ha!" moment of revelation in it because rather than being a film with a point of view it tries so very hard to be like a window on what actually happened.

What: Downfall
Playing soon at the Landmark Theaters in Denver
Who's if for: History buffs of various sorts.
Who won't like it: People who want some sort of grand insight into what made Hitler tick, people who want to be reassured they are right, and people who are annoyed by subtitles and don't speak German.
Personally: Thumbs Up