When your last film was Diana, the only way is up. Sure enough, 13 Minutes is a solid, meat-and-potatoes endeavour from the director Oliver Hirschbiegel. It returns him to the country (Germany) and period (second world war) that gave him his biggest success, Downfall, later extensively and comically re-subtitled on YouTube.
Hitler, the main character of that movie, features only tangentially here. The title refers to the amount of time which elapsed between the Führer leaving the Munich hall where he was delivering a speech in November 1939 and the detonation of the bomb which had been planted there. The failed assassin, Georg Elser (Christian Friedel), is apprehended and tortured. The film then flashes back and forth between his mounting unease at Hitler’s rise in the 1930s and his interrogation at the hands of the Gestapo.
The constant foreshadowing in Diana, in which no one seemed able to open their mouths without delivering a portent of the princess’s death, is largely absent – except for the occasional ironic remark (a girlfriend telling Elser that he can’t commit, or a telegram delivered to him with the words “I hope no one died”). But the storytelling is still suspiciously tidy. There is a metaphor for fascist brutality in a subplot involving the bullying husband of Elser’s lover (Katharina Schüttler). Overthrowing him plays like a test run for the attempt on Hitler’s life.
While there is plenty of drama in Elser’s courageous story, which has been left largely untouched by cinema aside from the 1989 thriller Seven Minutes, the character himself is rather sanctified by the movie. Fred Breinersdorfer’s screenplay never shows him so much as burning the toast or kicking the cat. Whenever there’s a report of another Nazi atrocity, or a newsreel celebrating the Third Reich, you can be sure Hirschbiegel will cut to a close-up of Elser looking stricken, just in case we weren’t sure how he might feel about, say, the bombing of Guernica.
Nevertheless, 13 Minutes succeeds in generating pockets of intensity. Friedel, whose rubberised face and wedge of wavy hair call to mind a young Michael Sheen, is dogged and driven as Elser, but not without a certain playfulness. Violence is released in quick, concentrated bursts that convey cruelty without gratuitousness. The juxtaposition of levity and brutality is especially startling, such as the outburst which follows a jaunty scene of the prisoner posing for snapshots with his captors.
What the picture sorely needs is the panache of Soldier of Orange or Black Book, Paul Verhoeven’s audacious excursions into the second world war. Hirschbiegel could also learn from those pictures the value of moral ambiguity. There is a compelling tale running through 13 Minutes, but Hirschbiegel doesn’t seem in any hurry to locate it.
