Downfall

It’s the waning days of World War II and Nazi Germany is in a bad way. The Allies have squeezed them out of Africa and Asia and have begun pushing deep into Europe. Berlin is being slowly suffocated by the Red Army of the Soviet Union and the American and British forces are not far behind. A setting like that usually calls for a grand, explosive film about the heroic Allies delivering the final, decisive deathblow to the exhausted Axis, but director Oliver Hirschbiegel decided to take things in an altogether more unique direction with Downfall, his 2004 character study of the infamous Adolf Hitler’s last days as he flails for some kind of military miracle from the tense confines of his bunker. Downfall is a German film told from the perspective of Hitler’s real-life secretary Traudl Junge, and made the somewhat unpopular decision to meet its detestable characters on their own terms, making an earnest attempt to understand how people ally themselves with evil. In the end this approach paid off and Downfall enjoyed heaps of well deserved praise for its stellar performances and tragic depiction of what Hannah Arnedt called the banality of evil. We’ll do our best to keep things lighthearted, but stories like these don’t exactly lend themselves to knee-slappers, so slap some patches on your suit’s elbows and light your pipe because Magellans at the Movies are diving into the pages of history.