German tries to kill Hitler in ‘13 Minutes’
If you admired last year’s World War II-era art house sleeper hit “Anthropoid,” you’re going to want to see Oliver Hirschbiegel’s “13 Minutes.” A return to form and subject matter for Hirschbiegel (“Downfall”) after a few missteps (“The Invasion,” “Diana”), the film tells the true, fictionalized story of Georg “Georgie” Elser (a tour de force Christian Friedel, “The White Ribbon”), a carpenter, musician and watch repairman from Germany’s Swabian Hills who almost single-handedly brings down the Third Reich when he bombs Munich’s Burgerbraukeller, where the Fuhrer Adolf Hitler (Udo Schenk) delivers a speech in 1939. The only reason Elser’s plot fails is because Hitler leaves 13 minutes before the bomb, which killed several Nazis and an innocent German waitress and mother, detonates.
Captured at the Swiss border, Elser is held throughout the war under the supervision of Hitler and tortured brutally. Because Hitler refuses to believe that such an “ordinary” person could come so close to killing him and that he must have a vast, mysterious force behind him, Elser is held until his scheduled execution. That is the bizarre, true story of the extraordinary Georg Elser.
The film, which was scripted by Leonie-Claire Breinersdorfer and Fred Breinersdorfer, captures the tension of the planting and timing of the bomb and of Elser’s almost successful attempt to get across the border before it goes off.
In flashbacks we meet Elsa Harlen (a marvelous Katharina Schuttler), a flirtatious married woman whose husband is an abusive drunken Nazi. Elsa and Georg meet at a village dance, where he plays accordion and they dance a tango. Eventually, Elsa’s lover Georg rents a room in the cellar from Elsa’s husband. Georg and Elsa have a son. Life is complicated, but Georg enjoys it until the Nazis rise to power and his friends who belonged to the Communist Party are rounded up and sent to forced labor camps, where they are abused and systematically murdered.
Georg’s decision to take matters into his own hands and try to cut the head off the Nazi beast is slow and completely credible, and Friedel makes Georg so alive and believably complex and recklessly brave that the film packs a big emotional wallop. Among Georg’s torturers is a local policeman named Arthur Nebe (the great Burghart Klaussner, “The People vs. Fritz Bauer”), who believes Georg worked alone, but is willing to torture him at the Fuhrer’s request.
In spite of everything, Nebe’s slow death hanging from wire attached to a meat hook is not something any human being could possibly derive satisfaction from. As that image suggests, “13 Minutes” will shake you up.
(“13 Minutes” contains violence and sexually suggestive scenes.)