This thoughtful and thorough drama-documentary (more drama, really, than doc) about the functioning of the Nazi high command opens with a gutsy promise that, “This film shows what has never been shown.”
It will seemingly lift the lid on the inner workings of the relationship between Hitler (Fritz Karl) and his propagandist-in-chief Joseph Goebbels (Robert Stadlober) and thus demonstrate how Goebbels seduced an entire populace into a “Total War” hate state via slickly made movies, comforting national mythology and fake news. And, crucially, it will tell this shocking tale via “thorough research”, including Nazi party records and speeches and pivotal chunks of archive footage.
And the result? Well, it certainly “feels” important. Any film that cuts repeatedly from recreated historical drama, as this one does, to grainy archive footage of Holocaust atrocities, mass graves and murder immediately acquires a pall of sickening gravitas. But as the movie rolls steadily forward through the Hitler narrative — from Munich 1938 to Poland to Stalingrad to the Final Solution and suicide in Berlin — a sense of creaky structural formula begins to emerge.
The German writer-director Joachim Lang frames the progress of the war as a series of conversations between Hitler and Goebbels that mostly conclude with both men praising the power of Nazi propaganda.
“The most valuable painting is not the most realistic, but the one that triggers the most emotions,” Goebbels says, explaining propaganda. “In the end we’re all propagandists who have secret intentions but must conceal them to fulfil what we want,” he says, explaining propaganda again.
There’s a lot of this. Too much, in fact, as if the Nazi top brass spent more time discussing the joys of propaganda than actually utilising it. What’s worse is that the repeated cuts to unnerving archive footage drain the adjacent dramatic scenes of any meaningful weight. It’s as if Karl is “playing at” (in the goofy sense) being Hitler while a couple of cuts away the real thing is ordering the death of six million Jews.
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There is interesting material too, including the Goebbels claim that mainstream movie entertainment can be a vehicle for the most potent messages. And yet the recent documentary The Commandant’s Shadow tackled the Holocaust with far greater emotional power, while Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest did so by deploying all the weapons in a dramatist’s arsenal. This film, though earnest and often compelling, is trapped somewhere in between. It never fully finds a voice.
★★★☆☆
15, 123min
In cinemas
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