Goebbels and the Führer film review — controversial biopic tries to get inside the Nazi mind

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Something jars from the start about Goebbels and the Führer. If you don’t believe me, ask director Joachim Lang. The film is a portrait of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, played with queasy gusto by Robert Stadlober. In Germany, it was turned down for public funding amid concerns a film with an uneasy touch of biopic would “humanise” the subject. The experience clearly stung Lang, who opens with one of the longer title card prologues in cinema history. 

“This film shows what has never been shown,” it begins. “It shows the perpetrators’ perspective. This is risky, but necessary.” (There is much more, even as anyone who recalls the much acclaimed Downfall is left pondering the part about “never been shown”.)

What follows plays as an origin story about modern political salesmanship: the mangled statistics and numbing slogans. In fact, the film is interested in the “private” Goebbels to limited extent. (An echo is found between his political career and PR-conscious marriage to Magda Goebbels.) And of course, the fakery is sadly prescient.

But the script spends a long time making sure we get the point, as a school teacher might with a class of bored 14-year-olds. Keen to make its intentions clear, it can get out of its depth. Do we need to see archive footage of Jewish bodies in the Warsaw Ghetto to grasp that Goebbels made some images inescapable and others invisible?

Perhaps we do. If Goebbels’ inner life is mostly just a maw of self-interest, the depth of his murderous antisemitism is also keenly felt. And if the film comes close to painting ordinary Germans as mere victims of his brainwashing, Lang is frank about the power of cinema, so often seen as an unqualified good. Here, as in life, Jud Süss — the rabid 1940 Nazi propaganda film — becomes the toast of the Venice Film Festival, praised by that future arthouse icon, Michelangelo Antonioni. The movies, Lang reminds us, have some very nasty secrets.  

★★★☆☆

In UK cinemas from June 6