Downfall

Downfall (2004)
IMDB #80 [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0363163/]

The Gist:
As I was watching this I had to wonder why the film was so popular, why people thought it was so good. I have come up with two reasons, one that Bruno Ganz makes for a pretty convincing Hitler, and two that there is a great fascination of Hitler's final days. Particularly with the second point, I think as an audience we want to see what the man's thought process was when he could see empire crumbling around him, what it would be like to see Hitler have doubts, to have his authoritative view of the world questioned by approaching defeat. In that sense the movie does well enough for itself, centered around a convincing performance (if not as air tight as people give it credit for). However, I do not believe this is a great movie. In fact, in terms of storytelling this is a weak film, because it continually tries to manipulate its audience into feeling something, everything is calculated to evoke what the filmmaker wants you to think instead of letting you make up your mind itself. Most of this comes from bad dialogue or overt compositional choices etc, that professes a poetry of the film too bluntly, like the secretary stating that "it all feels like a dream, blah, blah, blah". The scene has Hitler's soon to be wife leading everyone in the bunker into a dance hall and putting on music and dancing while bombs are still going off. It would already have a lurid dreamlike quality to it, all we need is the secretary's physical reaction to it we don't need it overstated in the dialogue. It just feels cheap. A lot of the film feels that way, its strangled in its good intentions.

On Another Note:
There is a small subplot in this film of a child soldier who tries to find his way back home through war torn Berlin that is good enough to be a movie itself. This might have been the only time where I thought the film truly touched upon something beautiful, a child lost in the death of the fallen city.