How the hell do you talk about Hitler? It's really hard, especially if you want to break from the accepted narrative even slightly. He's probably the most acceptable person to hate in the world. So, even if you wanted to make an argument that's he's only 99% evil rather than 100% evil, you'll meet heavy backlash. The idea of trying to present him as 50% evil, 50% mentally unstable, and 100% human is going to create a firestorm. That's exactly what happened with Downfall. The discussion of if it's acceptable to present Hitler at all took over the movie. Hell, I'm even trying to complain that the movie gets lost in the discussion by not actually talking about the movie, so I'm no better.
Without going too
much on a rant, it's gotten really hard to be a contrarian these days. There's
a good reason for some of the backlash. There are a lot of people who just like
to go against popular opinion for the sake of being argumentative and that gets
old quick. It turns into a five year old asking "why?" very quickly
and isn't at all instructive. Then again, the internet has made the world
overly quick to react to anything. Being willing to stop for a moment and
question things has value. Like most things in life, the trick is to not be a
dick about it, because that ruins it for the rest of us.
This is all a
long winded way of me saying that I don't think it's that big of a deal that Downfall
treats Hitler like a human being. It doesn't let him off the hook. It's not at
all a flattering portrait. It doesn't focus on his worst atrocities that much,
but it fits in some of that. It's actually refreshing to be reminded that he
isn't a monolith. It wasn't just him but a whole regime of people who did these
awful things. It takes more than one evil person to do everything we nominally
attribute to Hitler. Besides, shouldn't empathy work both ways? Reminding
people that he was just a man, even sometimes a pleasant man, helps ensure
something like what he did doesn't happen again.
When I read up on this film, it bothered me, because a lot of the protests about this film came from a position of "Well, I know better than to think this makes Hitler sympathetic, but other people won't". At least when people make a similar argument with something like 13 Reasons Why, the protest is that children legitimately may not know better. There's nothing about Downfall that is pro-Hitler. Nothing at all. The argument that showing Hitler in a complex, human way somehow mitigates the awful things he did is the kind of elitist nonsense that comes from people who pretend they aren't elitist but actually are. Normally, I'm worried that the filmmaker doesn't have enough faith in their audience to figure things out. In this case, the filmmaker does. It's critics of the movie that don't.
Sorry...I've gotten completely off track with this one. Thank god this not meant to be a movie review. I might as well get to talking some about the movie though. The most incredible thing about this film is that Bruno Ganz didn't have an aneurysm at some point. Saying he has a hair trigger in this is an understatement. Even finally putting all those angry Hitler memes in context, it's over the top. It's a good performance, just intense. While I appreciated the level of depth and detail, at over two and a half hours, the movie doesn't know when to end. Hitler is dead with 40 minutes left in the movie. I get that the point is that it's a whole system collapsing, not just one man, but that was a bit much. Still, I appreciated getting a perspective of WWII that I don't see much. In most movies, wars are won with a big battle. Downfall really emphasizes that it's a series of smaller defeats that stack up like a Jenga tower.
Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend
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