James Vanderbilt’s NUREMBERG turns one of history’s most documented trials into a nervy psychological two-step. Working from Jack El-Hai’s book THE NAZI AND THE PSYCHIATRIST, the screenwriter finds focus in holding cells where Rami Malek’s Douglas Kelly, a young, American psychiatrist, works with the enigmatic and unrepentant remnants of the Third Reich. Its an impossible job: Rudolph Hess (Andreas Pietschman) claims to have lost his memory, tasked with assessing Herman Goring (Russell Crowe) before trial, Kelly finds himself in an uneasy battle of wits.
Goring blames Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heyden for the concentration camps. The psychiatrist becomes both interrogator and admirer, a manipulated messenger who delivers letters to and from Goring’s family. Crowe, walks a theatrical tightrope between repulsive and magnetic, giving his best performance for years. An exceptional ensemble cast bolsters the Oscar winner. Michael Shannon lends gravitas and circumspection as the US Supreme Court Justice, Robert H Jackson, leading the prosecution’s effort to create an international and legal precedent.
Richard E Grant steals scenes as the Brit Howie Triest, lands the film’s most effective emotional punch. The old–school courtroom scenes, cooly lit by cinematographer Darius Wolski, are sleek and tense. When the dialogue and meticulous staging make way for real archival footage from the camps, it’s as wrenching as it ought to be. And, for all the Hollywood gloss, Vanderbilt sounds an alarming relevance in Goring’s claim that Hitler “Made us feel German again” and Triest’s warning that “That it happened because people let it happen”.
Although, set entirely in the late’40s, the present day is never far from the film’s thoughts, as the film serves in equal measures as a dusty how-to manual laying out the legal framework, as well as, the institutional hurdles to holding authoritarians accountable for crimes against their people, an indictment of local officials, commanding officers and statesmen who claim ignorance to the atrocities by their subordinates. There’s a lot of tisk-tsking rebuke of those who might sit in judgement of their enemies and condemn them as uniquely evil.
Kelly intends to break down Goring’s defences and superior intellect- the film comes awfully close to positioning the Nazi officer as a “Hannibal Lecter-like monster who amuses himself by toying with his prey- by exploiting his hubris and devotion to the Fuhrer, to expose his defence strategy to the prosecution while providing material for the blockbuster book he intends to write about the trial. The more time Kelly spends with Goring, the two begin to develop a grudging admiration for one another. Goring merely manipulating Kelly as his grand design to escape the hangman’s noose and Kelly realising that the impulses that guided the Nazis quest for global domination is a universal philosophy shared by his own nation. The film probes whether war crimes are more a matter of perspective than morality.
Vanderbilt entirely omits the legal defence for the accused Nazis, the closest the film comes to courtroom fireworks is a baffling exchange where Jackson (the crusading agent for justice) introduces evidence into the record that appears to exonerate Goring with the implication being that the jurist didn’t either read in advance or understand properly the exhibit which he built his case around. Perhaps NUREMBERG dedicates most of its efforts to underlining present-day parallels between Nazism and the current US administration.
Crowe, looking as corpulent as Marlon Brando, plays the role with a quiet intelligence and an almost twinkle in his eye, that stands in stark contrast to the crimes he’s accused of condoning. At times, it’s jerky and heavy-handed with the message feeling a bit woke. Crowe stuns in his ability to channel humanity, charm and civility into Goring while being equally reprehensible projecting an air that he is above the proceedings and will soon find his way out of the door into a new life.
Top class movie, gritty and savage.
