THE STORY – A WWII psychiatrist evaluates Nazi leaders before the Nuremberg trials, growing increasingly obsessed with understanding evil as he forms a disturbing bond with Hermann Göring.
THE CAST – Russell Crowe, Rami Malek, Michael Shannon, Leo Woodall, Richard E. Grant, John Slattery, Mark O’Brien, Colin Hanks, Lydia Peckham, Wrenn Schmidt, Lotte Verbeek & Andreas Pietschmann
THE TEAM – James Vanderbilt (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 148 Minutes
During the introduction at the world premiere of “Nuremberg,” director James Vanderbilt spoke of how he as a middle aged man grew up with direct familial connections to the horrors of the Second World War. For those of his daughter’s age, that period feels akin to the events the American Civil War: resonant, but in all practicality the stuff of the far past. With his latest film, he made it his mission to examine with contemporary attitudes the questions of wartime horror and transnational justice, all within the structure of a legal procedure with a psychologically complex edge.
Rami Malek stars as Lt. Colonel Douglas Kelley, an army headshrinker tasked with ensuring the cabal of high-ranking Nazi officials are of right mind in order to be hanged. His principal subject is Hermann Göring (Russel Crowe), a towering figure in the National Socialist movement, second only to Adolf Hitler in running the state for over a decade. Suave, charming, even gregarious, his almost aristocratic air and obvious charisma belies the horrors that he helped engineer. The very idea of a trial to hold these fallen leaders to legalistic account is presented as the brainchild of Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon), a Supreme Court justice who, even before victory had been achieved, had floated the idea of a formal, international record of these acts of barbarity to formalize the record so that there would be no doubt in future generations about what occurred and by whom.
The film plays in two interrelated modes: one, the direct connection between doctor and patient trying to out maneuver one another, and the other a courtroom drama with all the lack of nuance of a “Perry Mason” episode, complete with the “gotcha” moment that makes it all feel more procedural than profound.
Based on the 2013 non-fiction book by Jack El-Hai, the film works best when it dives into the symbiotic relationship between a narcissistic patient of great intelligence and a perfidious psychiatrist with clear issues of his own. Crowe is at his best having aged into character actor mode, and his prim and proper air with just a glint of malice behind the eyes is the film’s greatest strength. It’s not quite Hannibal Lecter-levels of mixing charisma and diabolical malice, but it’s closer than one might expect. The rest of the ensemble – including Richard E. Grant, John Slattery, Mark O’Brien, Colin Hanks, Lotte Verbeek and Lydia Peckham – do their utmost to inject life into what are fairly two dimensional roles on the page. Leo Woodall’s Sgt. Howie Triest character, with a grand reveal telegraphed so often that its final utterance feels almost insulting to any audience awake when it occurs, provides a kind of wide-eyed view of the events which gives the film at least some of its emotional weight.
Dariusz Wolski’s lensing is often handsome, mixing dark ambers and cool shades of blue, and the production design effectively evokes the era of post-war Germany. Larger scenes of scope, such as the one taking place at a bombed-out Nuremberg stadium, suffer from feeling faked with the lighting never quite aligning, while the more intimate moments inside the prison or the various houses are far more effectively realized.
This all brings to the fore the central problem with the film that may, for many, be cause to dismiss it entirely. The complex Nuremberg trials involved thousands of documents, hundreds of witnesses, numerous lawyers, and various investigative methods, employing the German’s own voluminous records as the basis for factual claims. This may be the reality of the trials, but also boring for audiences wanting something a bit more digestible. Thus, some may well be justifiably annoyed by the dumbing down of these critical events of global history just to fit into a convenient feature film running time. Worse, the importance of the central character is amplified for another “hook” into a story often told, making Kelley’s role in some ways elevated and in other ways diminished, all to suit the film rather than the historical record.
This leads to a core complication arising from Vanderbilt’s plea during the film’s intro. For all its bold moments of courtroom antics and mind games between monsters and their keepers, this is an almost insultingly pared down version of events from one of the most important legalistic moments in human history. By providing a convenient in within a broader entertainment, the film certainly introduces newer generations to what transpired, but it provides such a simplified view that it may actually do more harm than good.
The “ends justifies the means” aspect of the prosecutors’ actions, without the appropriate nuance of thought being exercised, will allow many to feel that the entire legal strategy was a cover for decisions already made, a mere façade to protect the honor of those who wrapped the rope around the necks of their fallen foes. The film does lip service to these larger issues, and one has to actively ignore the niggling reminders that the whole thing is almost childish in its simplifications and see it as a compelling drama set during heightened times.
The most powerful part of “Nuremberg” is the archival footage played at length. We see the map showing the hundreds of camps, the bodies captured on film stacked like cordwood, and skeletal figured with gaping eyes from the labour camps shown to many for the first time at these legal proceedings. These were trials that proved, through all the mechanisms of truth telling that modern society can provide, that these events happened, they were perpetrated by these men, and that they should pay for their crimes. And then there’s the final element that’s exposed in inelegant and yet impactful ways. Namely, that the Nazis were not another species of human, and their actions were not unique to this one place or one country. To shoot them against the wall and declare them monsters would be the easy thing to do at the end of the war, the hard part was to allow them to tell their stories, and show the poison at the heart of their actions that were anything but supernatural.
As Triest points out, the easiest would be to otherize this evil, just as the Nazis dehumanized those thrust into the camps. As the trial proved – and the film illustrates – the enemies to peace and compassion aren’t devils, they’re people, just as we are, making their actions that much more abhorrent. The prevention of the rise of similar evil is an unending project needing similar vigilance and tenacity as expressed by many of those captured here on screen in “Nuremberg.”
