Now’s an ideal time for a movie about the Nuremberg trials, especially one that looks at the nature of genocidal evil and what makes monsters into monsters.
Unfortunately, Nuremberg isn’t a movie that honors its subject. It’s sluggish, boring, poorly-paced, not about one of the more interesting angles of the trials, and is bogged down by two central performances that are terrible, despite coming from past Oscar winners.
Nuremberg was written and directed by James Vanderbilt. Best known as a screenwriter, he wrote the great Zodiac, as well as many middling blockbusters, including both Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies. His lone directorial credit before now was 2015’s Truth, one of the most inexplicable films of the last 25 years. That was about the Dan Rather/Bush National Guard documents scandal, positioned as an Oscar-bait movie, which argued that Rather and producer Mary Mapes were the heroes.
The new film is based on a 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, which was about the relationship between psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) and Herman Goering (Russell Crowe), the high-ranking Nazi who was put on trial at Nuremberg. Kelley wrote two of his own books about the experience, but the source material is Jack El-Hai’s more contemporary book.
There are numerous other characters, including Michael Shannon and Richard E. Grant as the American and British prosecutors, respectively, both of whom sport some of the best-looking suits you’ve ever seen. Colin Hanks plays a rival psychiatrist, while John Slattery is Burton C. Andrus, the supervisor who distrusts Kelley. Wrenn Schmidt plays a flirty female journalist in a subplot that goes nowhere. But the main trust of the story is the relationship between Kelley and Goering, and it doesn’t work.
The way it starts, Goering uses charm and manipulation to get on the side of his interlocutor, whose job is to make sure the Nazi defendants are both fit to stand trial and don’t kill themselves before justice can be done. That angle is soon dropped, while the idea of Douglas’ ethical considerations is also raised—is it ethical for him to treat a Nazi, and to violate doctor/patient confidentiality in reporting the contents of the sessions to his bosses?—before that’s dropped as well.
Neither Crowe nor Malek are strong, although the performances are bad in different and opposite ways. Crowe overacts, while Malek is practically a nonentity. The latter actor was one of the few things I didn’t hate about Bohemian Rhapsody, but if he isn’t backed by Queen’s music library, Malek isn’t a leading man.
When, in a trial scene, we see death camp footage of dead bodies piled on top of one another, it reminds us that that’s something that matters, while most of what happens in this movie doesn’t. Another trial scene, a faceoff between Shannon and Crowe, is meant as the film’s centerpiece, but that’s a fizzle, too.
There’s one moment that crystallized why this movie’s a dud. A heretofore relatively minor character, Leo Woodall’s Sgt. Howie Triest, delivers a monologue on a train platform that reveals his own personal backstory, and it’s beautiful and powerful. Why isn’t the movie about his story instead?
