There's no doubt that Rudolf Ditzen - or rather, Hans Fallada's book Every Man Dies Alone, or Alone in Berlin, is a masterpiece. This film 'adaptation' is far from it and is actually insulting the book and the true story and memory of Otto and Elise Hampel. A period drama set in Berlin during the heyday of Hitler's Nazi Party is an exceptionally ambitious, difficult and costly film to recreate, and the film maker and his team seem to me to have gone about this project in totally the wrong way - it's a confused jumble of priorities which negated the essence of the story and therefore the script completely lost sight of the intricacies and emotions of the real characters and the time in which they lived. The only real way to do justice to the novel is to serialise it as a television series; to explore the paranoia and the fear and the difficulties of living under the fascist regime, to show the poverty and hardship, the insidious mistrust of person for person, the degradation of society and the desperation of the inhabitants of Germany at that time. The film maker completely misses all of this, instead creating an atmosphere largely based on washed out colour and nothing being said. The costumes are far too neat and clean, everything is shiny and lovely and carefully placed, the casting is appalling - Emma Thompson, bless her, does pull in a good performance, but Brendan Gleeson plays himself as usual, and the detectives are just young boys completely out of their depth. And Depth is the biggest argument I have against this mockery of a great story ... there isn't any. It's superficial to say the least - only 10 percent of the characters from the original novel appear and the film maker pays little attention to those ten. It looks like it was filmed 'on the hoof' with very little thought for drama and direction, largely leaving it up to the mediocre actors to supply the viewer with the pathos needed. I wonder if when filming it more time was given over to style (which is largely inaccurate) than actual substance. This is not Alone in Berlin, it's simply a vacuous film that borrows a small idea from a truly dramatic, sad, and powerful real life story. Extremely disappointing and immature in every way.
Review of Alone in Berlin
