It’s difficult to know how to respond to this movie. Bruno Ganz’ alternately fierce and surreally sweet-tempered performance humanizes Hitler beyond what some people will find comfortable. It’s been said many times before, I’m sure, but it’s astonishing that the Academy clearly noticed this movie with its sole nomination for Best Foreign Language Film last year, but Ganz didn’t even get a look-in.

The story is seen from the point of view of his final secretary, Traudl Junge, who claims in interview clips that bookend the movie that she wasn’t aware of the extent of the horrors that were going on outside the Nazi world she knew. The regret shown in these clips is one of the movie’s many emotional punches. The one at the end is frozen after she says, “it would have been possible to find things out, being young was no excuse,” and it struck me deeply. The scariest thing about all that happened under Hitler is the fact that it happened, that such blind following is possible, that it’s still possible. But, like she says, there’s no excusing what these people did.

As far as the movie descends into one of the lowest ebbs of human history, the movie has an astonishingly ‘happy’ ending in a way, as a young boy, whose journey we have followed in fleeting glimpses during the movie (a little like the girl in the red coat of Schindler’s List), latches onto Junge, digs a discarded bicycle from under a footbridge, and the two ride off to an uncertain future. The bookend interview that follows casts you out of the movie feeling pretty hollow, but Junge’s smile as the boy picks up the bicycle is a priceless moment of beautiful hope in a very dark movie indeed.

With its length and the miserable depths it plumbs, it’ll be a long time before I put myself through this movie again, but it’s one of those movies I think everybody should see at least once, and as far as movies of its kind are concerned, it is way up there with Schindler and Das Boot.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 11th, 2006 at 6:00 pm in 5 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.