After being very keen about watching a dramatization of young Adolf Hitler, and what lead him to join politics in stead of art, the writing of his "Mein Kampf" and the rise of his evil soul, I must admit I was quite disappointed with this film in more than one way.
First of all it doesn't tell the story in a vary accurate way, it's also in a way more focused on other persons than Hitler himself. This makes the story confusing and difficult to follow. You simply doesn't get what it's all about. It's in a way illogical to me. What's the worst sin here, though, is that the film tells what should be an exciting story, too boring.
The film is well played, though the acting is quite theatrical, suited for the theater scene more than the big screen. No wonder, since this is based upon a play by George Tabori. in many ways, this hasen't been tranfered to a feature like it should have been. I can imagine it was strong in a theater.
But Hitler is well depicted, by Tom Schilling, as the strange bird he obviously was, with the insane racial ideas he obviously was indoctrinated with, and at least we get to know why he got involved with politics, and how his trademark mustache origin end. We see the poor conditions in Austria (or in fact much of Europe) a good hundred years ago. We a So see the racial hate towards the Jews, something which Hitler was inbred with. This is the best part of the movie. It seems to be very historically accurate in depiction of the living conditions.
We get to know young Hitler as an almost insane, ungrateful, untalented young brat, with disgusting attitude, insulting language, and still with a terrible strong intensity, which we all have seen in film clips. Hitler wasn't a great speaker, but his intensity still was able to make him "Der Fuhrer" for a German/Austrian population.
This could have been so strong and interesting, but has one up as quite disappointing. At least I had much bigger expectations after seeing great Austrian films by Michael Haneke and Ulrich Seidl.
