Downfall

This is a nominee for Best Foreign Film in this year’s Oscar race, and it would be a worthy choice. Not everybody will want to spend quality time with Hitler and his crew during their last ten days in the bunker, not even for the exhausting catalogue of ways and means to commit suicide. But I can’t imagine any film conveying a greater sense of “you are there,” whether you want to be or not. Picking up from a recent documentary about Hitler’s young secretary, the film convincingly answers the question of how you might get into that situation, and how you might get through it. Bruno Ganz makes Hitler believable and almost understandable, if not quite sympathetic. Eva Braun, Albert Speer, the Goebbels family, and all the rest of the characters in this lumpen Gotterdammerung are also believably real if unbelievably misguided people. For its native German audience, this must be a particularly powerful, perhaps necessary experience. For the rest of us, Oliver Hirschbiegel delivers impeccable filmmaking if not a lot of laughs or tears. (2004, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-82, RT-91.)