Movies: The Human Face of Evil

Here's a moviegoing opportunity you may want to refuse but should not: spending 21/2 hours trapped underground in a dank bunker with world history's most loathsome creature.

Downfall is a German film--epic in scale, painstaking in detail, superbly acted--that recounts the last days of Adolf Hitler and his circle of associate monsters in the spring of 1945. The locale is ruined Berlin, encircled by the implacably advancing Russians as its population descends into anarchy. Belowstairs, Hitler (toweringly played by Bruno Ganz) spirals deeper into unreality. Hunched over his maps, he orders imaginary armies to attack, while his toadies, in their spiffy uniforms, look nervously at one another. Who's going to risk his rage by telling him the truth?

The Führer is even creepier when he succumbs to whispery-voiced, almost catatonic self-pity as he tries to relate to courtiers. Half of them are (as he is) contemplating suicide, while the rest are plotting desperate escapes. There has been some criticism of director Oliver Hirschbiegel's Oscar-nominated film for humanizing Hitler and his gang, but that's nonsense. Because, of course, they were human. The world has since known dictators just as insane. And we can be sure their acolytes exhibited the same range of ugly behavior (denial, cynicism, narcissism) shown in this film. The inclusion of a few innocents and dissidents hardly brightens the picture.

What's perhaps most striking about Downfall is how profoundly everyone in the bunker loves death. Hitler, naturally, thinks the Germans have betrayed him and is willing to let them all die in a great Götterdämmerung while he passes out poison capsules to his circle. This leads to the most horrifying sequence in the film: Magda Goebbels, wife of the notorious Propaganda Minister, poisoning all six of her children because she does not want them to grow up in a world without National Socialism. This act, a blend of romantic and ideological fervor, is almost unbearable to witness. But it stresses what this riveting film most wants to say: that perversion is well within human possibility, especially among those possessing absolute power. --By Richard Schickel