Oliver Hirschbiegel is the director who made Downfall (2004), the grippingly claustrophobic account of Hitler’s final days in the bunker – but also the notoriously clunking biopic Diana (2013), starring Naomi Watts. This film puts Hirschbiegel back on surer ground: a workmanlike true-life study of Georg Elser, the carpenter who made a failed attempt on the life of Hitler in Munich in 1939; his bomb went off too late and Elser was captured and finally executed in Dachau in 1945. (He is also the subject of a 1989 movie entitled Seven Minutes, directed by its star, Klaus Maria Brandauer.)
It features an excellent performance from Christian Friedel as Elser himself (Friedel played the young schoolteacher in Haneke’s The White Ribbon and Heinrich von Kleist in Jessica Hausner’s Amour Fou) and it is structured, confidently if conventionally, around flashbacks after Elser is arrested, sketching in his rural Catholic background, his instinctive non-party leftism and his unhappy affair with a married woman. Father-and-daughter screenwriters Fred and Léonie-Claire Breinersdorfer exercise some speculative creative licence in Elser being interrogated by Arthur Nebe (Burghart Klaussner), the Nazi police chief who was later executed for his part in the 1944 Stauffenberg conspiracy, and so portraying Nebe as being influenced by Elser. It’s an interesting idea, and a decently acted, heartfelt film.
