If the Nuremberg trials were political theatre, writer and director James Vanderbilt leans into the spectacle of it. His new movie Nuremberg, about the show put on for the rest of the world to indict Nazi war criminals, is packaged like old-fashioned entertainment. There are movie stars (chiefly Rami Malek and Russell Crowe) with slicked-back hair, trading snappy barbs and self-important monologues in smoky rooms, meanwhile the gravity of the moment tends to be kept at bay. All the bureaucratic and legal speak around fine-tuning an unprecedented process, where one country prosecutes the high command of another, goes down easy in an Aaron Sorkin sort of way. It is riveting when its urgency is defended by an actor as great as Michael Shannon. It is all so watchable, to a fault, especially when dealing with the unspeakable.
There’s some rhyme and reason to the director’s approach. Vanderbilt (who wrote the screenplay for David Fincher’s Zodiac, a masterpiece about the impossible pursuit for truth) has made a movie about two figures so narcissistic, opportunistic and caught up in the showmanship that they leave very little room for the gravity of the moment to sink in.
Malek plays Douglas M Kelley, the psychiatrist tasked with monitoring the indicted prisoners’ mental health, just to make sure they don’t kill themselves before they stand trial. We meet him confidently flirting with a woman on a train, playing card tricks to show off his ability to read and misdirect his opponents.
Crowe, often shot to fill the frame, plays Hermann Göring, the commander in chief of the Luftwaffe deemed the second most powerful man in Germany. He’s introduced in an opening that quickly goes from clever to flippant, where onscreen text announces that Adolf Hitler is dead and 70 million have perished in the war. In one take we watch as migrants move on foot through an Austrian wasteland (a road to where would be the question) and a soldier relieves himself on the swastika painted on a bombed-out Nazi vehicle.
In comes Crowe’s Göring, chauffeured in a limousine, surrendering to the allied forces by commanding they take his luggage. Crowe is one of the few people onscreen who can manage the comic relief without undercutting the weight of his character, whatever humour or witticisms Göring dishes out laced with calculated malevolence.
Much of Nuremberg hangs on the scenery chewing between Kelley and Göring during casual therapy sessions, where both seem to bond over their shared affinity for gamesmanship, while ultimately pursuing their own claim to infamy. Göring is gearing up for a trial where he can reinforce the Nazi ideals he still stands by, and go down as a martyr if he must, while taking no responsibility for the Holocaust. Kelley can’t wait to write a book on what goes on in the minds of Nazis.
Spoiler alert: the fruit of Kelley’s labour is called 22 Cells in Nuremberg. In his review of the 1947 book’s assessments – about how Nazi psychology could not only influence those abroad but was in part fostered by the west – Fredric Wertham writes “there is little in America today which could prevent the establishment of a Nazi-like state.” Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg hammers down on that argument, and its relevance today, with Crowe’s Göring echoing a familiar slogan when he says Hitler “made us feel German again”.
The point Vanderbilt perhaps unintentionally skirts, is how ultimately hollow the spectacle at Nuremberg can feel; not just in his movie, but since prosecuting war crimes and establishing international law has done nothing to prevent the atrocities in Gaza. That sort of realness never cracks through the polished surfaces in Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg, which is too often seduced by the spectacle it should be more critical of.
The movie reduces Kelley’s psychiatric insights into soundbites, manages to whittle down the proceedings at the Nuremberg trials into the familiar tropes and cliches from classic courtroom movies, and even lets Crowe’s performance surrender its nuances to hammy villainy, all for the sake of reliable entertainment.
A pivotal point in Nuremberg arrives during the trial, when prosecutors show shocking and horrifying footage filled with emaciated, mutilated and decaying bodies at concentration camps. Vanderbilt opts to show the real footage. But instead of ushering in the gravity this movie keeps at a distance for so long, the authentic material only highlights how artificial everything surrounding it really is.
