My Fuehrer -- the Really Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler

Bottom Line: "The Really Truest Truth" about Hitler might be really true, but it's not really funny.

Helge Schneider play Hitler in "Mein Fuehrer." Despite flashes of humor, director-screenwriter Dani Levy seems to avoid more opportunities for jokes than he takes.  Jan. 9, 2007 By Eric T. Hansen BERLIN -- The marketing concept is a sound one: Sixty years after the end of World War II, Germans want to forget the shame and guilt of the Third Reich and be able to laugh about Hitler. That's the zeitgeist that almost certainly will make "My Fuehrer -- the Really Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler" (Mein Fuehrer -- Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit ueber Adolf Hitler) a hit in Germany, where it opens Thursday, and it also provides a slogan ("Germany's first comedy about Hitler!") that will generate respectable ticket sales in art house theaters internationally. The only problem is that "Mein Fuehrer" is not actually funny. The film is being marketed as a comedy and is being compared to other great Third Reich comedies, from Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" to Roberto Benigni's "Life Is Beautiful." But it is not so much a comedy as a bland, politically correct fantasy about a Jew who teaches Hitler how to be Hitler. As played by stand-up comedian Helge Schneider, Hitler is a lovable sad sack who has lost his will to triumph in the final months of the war at a time when the German people need him most. Goebbels has a great idea: We'll take a Jewish actor named Adolf Gruenbaum out of a concentration camp and get him to coach Hitler to make a single last-ditch effort inspire the Germans to support the war at an upcoming rally. What follows is a chamber play between the two, in which Gruenbaum (played with quiet precision by Ulrich Muehe, fresh off his success in "The Lives of Others") devotes most of his time to therapy, getting Hitler to crawl around on hands and knees, barking, and to talk about his relationship with his father. There are flashes of humor: Hitler in a track suit, Hitler playing with a toy battleship in a bubble bath or Hitler being humped by his dog Blondi. But director-screenwriter Dani Levy seems to avoid more opportunities for jokes than he takes. There are even flashes of controversy, as when the dictator tauntingly asks Gruenbaum why the Jews didn't fight back. (This question is mirrored in Gruenbaum's situation: Although the opportunity is repeatedly handed to him on a silver platter, Gruenbaum never has the nerve to kill Hitler.) But the theme is neither developed enough to inspire controversy nor funny enough to entertain. Levy, a Swiss-born Jewish auteur who tackled German-Jewish issues in his recent hit "Go for Zucker!" seems less interested in comedy than he is in getting across a moral: We learn that Hitler had a small penis and was compensating for an unhappy childhood. That might be true, but we've heard it before, and from real historians. In the meantime, it has lost its allure as history or as potential for humor. The final joke in the movie is a pun: When Hitler loses his voice, Gruenbaum has to bark the speech into a microphone while the Fuehrer lip-syncs it. Gruenbaum takes the opportunity to instruct the German nation to "Heal yourselves" (instead of "Heil Hitler," since heil also means "heal" in German). It's an important message but a weak pun. The mood is light throughout, production values are excellent, and the film works as entertainment directed at an older set of viewers who are opposed to excitable fare. (Three state-funded public broadcasters, whose core audiences are largely older than 50, were involved in the production.) But to duplicate the success of "Life Is Beautiful," Levy would have done better to concentrate on the characters and comedy and leave the preaching to others. MY FUEHRER -- THE REALLY TRUEST TRUTH ABOUT ADOLF HITLER X Filme Creative Pool/Y Filme Directors Pool Credits: Director-screenwriter: Dani Levy Producer: Marcos Kantis Executive producers: Stefan Arndt, Barbara Buhl, Andreas Schreitmueller, Bettina Reitz Director of photography: Carl-F Koschnick Art director: Christian Eisele Music: Niki Reiser Costume designer: Nicole Fischnaller Editor: Peter R. Adam Cast: Adolf Hitler: Helge Schneider Prof. Adolf Gruenbaum: Ulrich Muehe Dr. Joseph Goebbels: Sylvester Groth Elsa Gruenbaum: Adriana Altaras Albert Speer: Stefan Kurt Heinrich Himmler: Ulrich Noethen Rattenhuber: Lambert Hamel Martin Bormann: Udo Kroschwald Running time -- 90 minutes No MPAA rating

Juliane Kohler, Bruno Ganz and Heino Ferch share a moment in Adolf Hitler's bunker in "Downfall." Sep. 16, 2004 Downfall By Eric Hansen   Bottom line:  Definitive re-creation of Hitler's last days in the bunker features a powerful performance by Bruno Ganz and should find its audience on the art house circuit. BERLIN -- One of the best war movies ever made, "Downfall" is a powerful and artistically masterful re-creation of the last days of the Third Reich. A film that will set new standards in the art of committing history to celluloid, it is sure to spark strong word-of-mouth and generate ticket sales on the art house circuit -- and could pick up major awards. "Downfall" tells not only the historically accurate tale of the last days of Hitler and his henchmen, which they spent in a bunker under the streets of Berlin, but also, in state-of-the-art battle sequences, of the civilians and soldiers fighting and dying on the savaged streets above as the Soviet Army turned the city into a pile of rubble. The combined power of the chamber play unraveling in the bunker and the horrible epic slaughter in the streets above (which, of course, Hitler could have stopped at any time by surrendering) elevates the film from a historical re-enactment to a full-fledged war movie, on par with "Saving Private Ryan" and "Das Boot" in every regard. With its horrific and realistic depiction of the human beings who caused all this, "Downfall" could be the most important movie ever made about World War II. The script, written masterfully by producer Bernd Eichinger ("The Name of the Rose," "The House of the Spirits"), closely follows the definitive book "Inside Hitler's Bunker," by renowned historian Joachim Fest, as well as on the reminiscences of Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge, whose story was turned into an excellent interview/documentary under the title "Blind Spot" (two sections of the interview frame the dramatized action of "Downfall"). Although the young Junge acts as a kind of main character, Eichinger has resisted the temptation to invent any nonhistoric characters for the viewer to sympathize with. What we get in "Downfall" is as close to what really happened as we will ever see on celluloid. The actors are on the money, which makes Oliver Hirschbiegel's direction look nothing less than brilliant. And the same goes for An Dorthe Braker's inspired casting. Indeed, a major difference between this film and earlier depictions of Hitler is that these actors are all believably German, neither just blond and blue-eyed stereotypes nor craven caricatures of evil. It is easy to imagine any of them as the guy next door -- or even as yourself, given the circumstances. This is Hirschbiegel's artistic triumph: He makes sure we see that the "face of evil" didn't come from outer space but from among us. Juliane Koehler plays Eva Braun with a weird, demented carelessness -- she is almost ecstatically happy to die with her Adolf (whom she marries at the very end), but at the same time she seems stupidly to have no real comprehension of the destruction going on around her. She is Marie Antoinette in a dirndl. When Magda Goebbels, played dignified and murderous by Corinna Harfouch, poisons her own children so they won't have to face the disappointment of growing up in a world without Nazism, you wonder whether the Third Reich was state or religion. But the sensation of the film is Bruno Ganz ("Wings of Desire") in a stunning performance as Hitler. Physically, Ganz slumps, shrinks and scowls -- Hitler's health was failing at this point, and Ganz captures the sunken little man perfectly. Most importantly, not once does he slip into a caricature of evil. Ganz shows you a human being. When he refuses to leave Berlin and save himself, you can see that in his mind he is performing an act of heroism. The perverted humanity of Hitler and his henchmen may be a problem for some reviewers and community leaders, who may fear that neo-Nazis will watch the movie and be moved, not horrified, by Hitler's last days. That's a small risk, though, for a film that succeeds on all levels in saying so much not only about the horrors of the 20th century, but about human nature as well. Downfall ("Der Untergang") World Sales: EOS Distribution Production company: Constantin Film Co-Producers NDR, WDR, Degeto Film, ORF and EOS Production and RAI Cinema CREDITS Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel Writer: Bernd Eichinger, based on the book "Inside Hitler's Bunker" by Joachim Fest and "Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary" by Traudl Junge and Melissa Mueller Producer: Bernd Eichinger Production Executive: Christine Rothe Director of photography: Rainer Klausmann Production designer: Bernd Lepel Music: Stephan Zacharias Casting: An Dorthe Braker Costume designer: Claudia Bobsin Editor: Hans Funck Special effects: Die Nefzers Sound Design: Stefan Busch Sound: Roland Winke Sound mixing: Michael Kranz Line producer: Silvia Tollmann CAST: Adolf Hitler: Bruno Ganz Traudl Junge: Alexandra Maria Lara Magda Goebbels: Corinna Harfouch Joseph Goebbels: Ulrich Matthes Eva Braun: Juliane Kohler Albert Speer: Heino Ferch Prof. Schenck: Christian Berkel Prof. Dr. Werner Haase: Matthias Habich Hermann Fegelein: Thomas Kretschmann Helmuth Weidling: Michael Mendl Wilhelm Mohnke: Andre Hennicke Heinrich Himmler Ulrich Noethen No MPAA rating Running time -- 150 minutes