Russell Crowe and Rami Malek face off in an historical battle of wits and Weltanschauung in James Vanderbilt's new film Nuremberg. The movie comes to cinemas to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the first international trials of the Nazis in the fall of 1945. Based on Jack El-Hai's 2013 book about the fateful encounter between the Berkeley psychiatrist Douglas Kelley and Hitler's second-in-command and the highest-ranking Nazi to be put on trial by the Allies, Hermann Goering, the story revolves around Kelley's assignment to ensure that the defendants at Nuremberg were fit to stand trial, and charts his complex personal relationship with Goering up until he takes the stand.
Vanderbilt's film runs to just shy of two-and-a-half hours, with the trial itself appearing about halfway through. This would not be such a noteworthy observation were it not that the pacing and tone of the production were so uneven. The first half of the film feels very slow and plodding. To compensate, one cannot help but feel that in an attempt to engage the viewer, Vanderbilt's production trips over itself. The story is often burdened with tin-eared asides, misjudged contrivances, and jarring use of voiceover. Similarly, the slapstick technicolored home-movie backstory of Nazi leader Rudolf Hess crashing a decidedly modern Cessna into the Scottish highlands like a Nazi Dorothy in the land of Oz feels very off-beam. There are running gags, some of which pay off, and others which just don't.
There are ideas that do work: the trope of the magician's sleight of hand has a glorious and inventive pay-off. But the tongue-in-cheek reprise of Crowe in Gladiator leading his war criminals down the tunnel into the courtroom is of questionable taste to say the least. Such inglorious bastardizations don't sit well with the actual footage of the camps shown subsequently. Notwithstanding, the film has an undeniably stellar cast, and Michael Shannon and Richard E. Grant fill the screen with riveting performances in the courtroom as prosecutors. Crowe is best when he is given the opportunity to show complex emotion beyond a lispy German-accented braggaccio and Malek shines when he lets his psychiatrist unleash the heady mix of impotent and righteous anger that would be his eventual undoing. Correspondingly, when the two men are given the opportunity, their chemistry is scintillating.
Sadly, set-ups around this intense huis clos are often labored, with storylines that fizzle out and characters who become suddenly pivotal and then recede into the background. Perhaps most frustrating is the brevity of the epilogue, which skips over the last lonely years of Douglas Kelley's life after the trial. A stunning reveal about what became of Kelley's life merits more than some cursory text tagged on before the end credits. Rami Malek has incredible range and a more nuanced film charting his descent into a pariah and Cassandra figure deserved so much more. For a film about the battle of minds to gloss over the tragic denouement seems like a missed opportunity for a drama that deserved to have the psychological depth and courage of its convictions.
That the film seems to be stylistically uneven may be in no small part due to the weight of the thematic engagements it attempts to bring to the fore. Long before any such trials took place, there was a question looming over the public discourse that persists to this day about the nature of evil and mass psychology. It is a fateful question addressed by Vanderbilt's film when it is at its most convincing. Do those who commit crimes against humanity, forfeit their own? The entreaty is as virulent as it is insistent. It appears in questions about whether judging such crimes is legitimate at all, and extends to the very idea of what it means to be sane and responsible for such genocidal abominations.
The U.S. prosecution chose to turn down offers, including by then-General Dwight D. Eisenhower, to stand in the witness box in favor of a spectacular move: showing a specially compiled documentary, a devastating expose of the crimes of the Holocaust, as Exhibit 230. At Nuremberg, the courtroom-turned-cinema screened the visceral barbarism of the concentration camps to a horrified world watching the proceedings. Vanderbilt paces this sequence well. El-Hai writes in his book that after watching the footage of murder, unspeakable abjection and slaughter, Goering is said to have remarked, "It was all going so well and then they showed that awful film."
The hubris and the delusion in this one throwaway remark — exposing Goering as a man totally bereft of empathy and coldly aware of his complicity — do not make it to Vanderbilt's film. Crowe's Goering simply dismisses the evidence as fake news. Rather, Nuremberg builds to a showdown on the stand, trapping him, with Kelley's help, into declaring his unwavering fealty to Hitler beyond the grave. While it may serve a story about a maverick genius psychiatrist and a floundering prosecutor, this construct of Goering as a man of enormous legal intellect and demagogic prowess seems all too crudely established and easily dismantled when the time comes.
Vanderbilt's film arrives at theaters as the latest in a long line of films made about the trials of Nazi war crimes. It would be hard to follow such earth-shattering performances by Maximilian Schell and Spencer Tracy in 1961's Judgement at Nuremberg as well as Brian Cox's excoriating presence as Goering in Yves Simoneau's 2000 miniseries Nuremberg. The film also appears in the age of social media psychology, within a cacophony of diagnostic terminology: using, for example, the term 'narcissist' in his script, eliciting mental images of talking heads on podcasts and reels on the phone, where the mere mention of the word 'Nazi' a decade ago might have provided sufficient abhorrence.
The moral abnegations of the Holocaust on show at the trial seemed to demand an explanation beyond the moral scope of what it is to be rational. With crimes so abject, some were tempted then, as now, to conclude that the only bearable accounting of these criminals must be in the realms of the demonic, the otherworldly. These were not the conclusions of Douglas Kelley, in his book published after the trials or in this film. Kelley saw Goering and the Nazis ultimately as quite ordinary men, and most damningly, he found that he shared certain personality traits with them. Rather than find the extraordinary in their pasts to explain their crimes, he was forced to conclude that no such demonic forces or cataclysmic motives need exist. Writing about Adolf Eichmann's 1961 trial in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt would famously remark that she saw the 'banality of evil' in the pinched figure standing behind bulletproof glass at court.
The genocidal evil of the Nazis was, and is, often accorded a type of 'genius' — an idea that often persists in public discourse as a way to account for the sheer malice in the planning and execution of the Holocaust as something exceptional. Because to accept Douglas Kelley's conclusions that the capacity for the most unspeakable atrocity is latent in our own reality is shockingly quotidian and perhaps too frightening to hear; a responsibility too terrible to accept and yet too prescient to ignore.
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