13 Minutes movie review & film summary (2017)
Hirschbiegel’s career has had some dips since then. A curious 2007 rethink of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” titled “The Invasion,” was a fever-paced head-scratcher. His 2013 Princess Diana biopic proved a massive miscalculation. A cynic might say that after that disaster a revisitation of German history on the level of “Downfall” might be an apt way to revive a damaged career. But “13 Minutes” is too good on its own terms to support such a reading. It’s a genuine achievement on an inexhaustible subject.
The movie begins with its lead character, Georg Elser (Christian Friedel) rigging a bomb into a wall. It’s a big one, too; he’s packed at least a dozen sticks of dynamite in it. He then rigs a timing mechanism, and the camera dollies out to show a table with a placard on it reading “The Fuhrer’s Chair.”
It’s 1939, six years and change since Hitler took power. A few months ago, Britain and France declared war on Germany. The bomb is timed to go off on November 8, the anniversary of the-now-Fuhrer’s failed Beer Hall Putsch. And so it does—13 minutes after Hitler leaves the packed beer hall where he addressed a friendly crowd. Many died, many were injured, but Hitler escaped. And was infuriated.
Elser seems an unlikely assassin. True, he looks appropriately panicked when he is apprehended shortly after the explosion, but when the movie flashes back to 1932, and his life in a village by Lake Constance, he’s a cheerful accordion player and woodworker. One of the most effective aspects of the movie is its depiction of how the Nazi poison seeped into the provinces, abetted by bigots who recognized that der zeit was now on their side. One morning Elser is walking through the village square with a young boy, who parrots some anti-Semitic gossip he heard from his father. “When did you get to be a moron all of a sudden,” Elser says jokingly to the little boy. He hasn’t much time to remain cheerful.
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