Wonderful Movie

Truly Dreadful Film

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Directed by Lutz Hachmeister and narrated by Kenneth Branagh, this is such a direct and accessible series of insights into the psychopathy of Hitler's propagandist. I found it amazing to see just how narcissistic and arrogant this Goebbels really was and now naively he felt superior to others, despite the very clear limitations of his intellect. It's as if he had almost no interpersonal, nor intrapersonal intelligence whatsoever. How tragic when we see, throughout history, these men who think their grand schemes of globalism and corporate fascism, will amount to anything more than social oppression, violence, and destruction.Carl Jung often mentioned this "idée fixe" as basis of neurotic dysfunction, the disintegration of human morality and concern for "others as self" in the interest of egomaniac self-preoccupation. Goebbels was not only the architect of the Holocaust, he embodied the male, monomania of racial superiority that clearly was driven by his early failures in the banking industry and his rejection by childhood peers related to the deformity of his paralysed leg. How tragic that such weakness becomes so much self-hatred served upon millions of other, innocent people.This film depicted a truth that felt like reportage. I found that it worked extremely well as my understanding of the subject was both deepened and broadened. The production quality was excellent.

This is a very interesting and surprisingly engaging film. Branagh reads excerpts from Goebbels' diary or translations of speeches while the film shows newsreel footage, scenes from propaganda films, and bits from theatrical movies. Sometimes the visual footage illustrates Goebbels's words; sometimes it provides an ironic juxtaposition. I have one important reservation. There is no real attempt to include even coverage of events during the period. Quite a few subjects are simply not mentioned. For example, there is no discussion of the German's defeat at Stalingrad, which must have been a gigantic problem for Goebbels as Propaganda Minister. Even more striking, there is very little discussion of Nazi treatment of the Jews. The film includes some early anti-Semitic quotations and a little footage of Kristallnacht, but nothing that I can recall about the Holocaust itself. Perhaps Goebbels' diaries don't include entries about these subjects, but the omission is striking.

My complaints here concern the movie's pacing and the material at hand. While using archival film and letters lends the film a fresh and interesting perspective, too often the material selected to highlight simply isn't very interesting (such as when Goebbels complains about this or that ailment, &tc., or the ad nauseam footage of his small German hometown). Also, the movie crawls along in covering c. 1920-1939 and then steams through the war years. In sum, the film is little better than a History Channel documentary, with the exception that the filmmaker has a slightly greater sensibility than your average History Channel documentary editor and thus can more artfully arrange the details of Goebbels' life. Still, I found it wanting.

This film basically has the narrator reading from Josef Goebbels diary from the early 20's through to his death in 1945. The film is bookended by the charring corpse of Goebbels, though the film reveals his dead daughters, since Goebbels had them poisoned rather than be captured. You learn a lot of things about Goebbels. He critiqued movies, panning The Battleship Potemkin for being too unsubtle in its propaganda (and obviously being inspired by it at the same time.) He thought Churchill was a better speaker than "that idiot Chamberlain". He was paranoid, often attacking then loving Hitler. You learn that Hitler's favorite men were not friends (Goebbels hates Goring, for example.) This is a must see for anyone interested in the goings-on in the inner sanctum of the Nazis.