Nuremberg isn't subtle, but it turns out prosecuting Nazis doesn't need to be
Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) is on trial and James Vanderbilt's loud, urgent, earnest courtroom drama reminds viewers how history repeats itself.
Photo: Sony Pictures Classics
One of the first images in James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg is a man pissing on a swastika. The rest of the film isn’t much more subtle. To be fair to Nuremberg, written and directed by Vanderbilt and based on Jack El-Hai’s book The Nazi And The Psychiatrist, subtlety might not have ever been called for here. The broad strokes of the Nuremberg trial are familiar: an unprecedented, sweeping global effort to hold surviving Nazi leaders to account for their crimes. It’s already gotten the movie treatment more than once on the big screen and the small, so as Vanderbilt goes back to that well, it’s welcome that he’s angling for something a bit different.
Ironically, though, what stands out about this particular Nuremberg dramatization is not its effort to play with the narrative of the trial, or its clever notion to concoct a kind of Nazi Silence Of The Lambs. No, Nuremberg works best when it’s loud, urgent, and almost hysterically earnest in its messaging, not because it’s a particularly new message, but because it once again feels like something someone must scream from the rooftops.
Nuremberg takes a two-pronged approach to documenting the trial, beginning with the surrender of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) in the days after Adolf Hitler’s suicide. As the most powerful man in Nazi Germany still alive after the war, Göring is public enemy number one in the trial that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon) hopes to organize. Jackson’s side of the story, at least at first, lays out the broad strokes of the Nuremberg trials, following a dogged prosecutor as he tries to assemble a tribunal unlike anything ever before seen.
But the narrative quickly pivots, not abandoning Jackson’s story exactly, but back-burnering it in favor of Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), a hotshot U.S. Army psychiatrist who’s been called to a secret military prison to examine and evaluate the remaining members of Nazi high command, Göring chief among them. Energetic, charming, and practically drooling over the notion of getting inside the mind of the world’s most famous surviving Nazi, Kelley dives right in, thinking there’ll be a bestselling book in it for him if he can crack Göring’s mind.
