That scene is hard to get through. For reasons unclear, Hirschbiegel does not give us the full-frontal when Hitler and Eva finish themselves off, nor Magda and her creepy husband, Joseph (played with steely intensity by Ulrich Matthes), but he stays with the death of the kids through it all, making us see Magda's resolve overcoming her love, and the craziness under her icy beauty. It's truly chilling.
Perhaps the most problematic character is an SS doctor, Ernst-Guenter Schenck (played brilliantly by Christian Berkel). When one sees the double-runes, the lightning flashes, of the inner party adorning his black lapel, one's trigger finger begins to twitch. Yet it turns out that Dr. Schenck is genuinely humane and heroic: He's all over the place, bringing penicillin to cut-off hospitals, scampering through fire to deliver it, working 21-hour days in a trauma ward where he gets a crash course in wound surgery, arguing against the Nazi martyr complex in favor of mercy for civilians and the wounded.
Equally, the German officers seem exceedingly professional and heroic. They're all duty guys: no deserters, just hard, practical military men stuck in a dreadful mess and aware that they are doomed and struggling to find an ethical -- by their standards -- way of dealing with it.
And so we ask: Should we admire these people? They are genuinely heroic, caught in a genuinely tragic situation, in the crushing midst of death and chaos. The movie invites you to despise them, but somehow, you can't. How much easier if the country had been all Joes and Magdas, all Adolfs and Evas, clear mutants from normalcy. But alas, and unforgettably, as "Downfall" makes clear, most of the Nazis were human beings.
Downfall (148 minutes, in German and Russian with subtitles, at Landmark's E Street and Loews Georgetown) is rated R for extremely graphic depictions of wounds, some nudity and the disturbing deaths of children.
As Hitler, Bruno Ganz imbues a twisted sociopath with a bit of humanity.
Bruno Ganz as Adolf Hitler and Heino Ferch as Albert Speer in "Downfall," a meticulously authentic German film that was nominated for an Oscar.
