If you follow the news or perhaps live in one of the American cities where masked thugs are abducting people off the streets, having its citizenry assaulted, or its resources hollowed out by a kleptocratic government, you may have found yourself wondering, “Hey, how exactly did the United States hold fascists responsible 80 years ago anyway?” You’re not alone: it would appear to be top of mind for filmmaker James Vanderbilt as well, who rather pointedly chose this exact moment to make Nuremberg. The film is a reenactment of the famed Nuremberg trials held in the years following World War II wherein the surviving members of the Nazi high command were called to account in front of a multinational tribunal, with the majority of them hanged for war crimes soon thereafter.
Although set entirely in the late ’40s, the present day is never far from the Nuremberg‘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 elected officials, commanding officers, and statesmen who would claim ignorance to the atrocities committed by their subordinates, and a tsk-tsking rebuke of those who might sit in judgment of their enemies and condemn them as uniquely evil (yes, they’re talking about you). It lends a prescience to historical subject matter that was previously dramatized at some length in 1961’s star-studded Judgment at Nuremberg, but also a glibness that diminishes the atrocities of the National Socialists by equating them to the (reprehensible if not actually genocidal) actions of the current U.S. government. It also reframes the interrogation of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring as a “we are not so different, you and I” transient friendship of reaching across the divide.
Opening with the surrender of Göring (Russell Crowe, having fully settled into middle-aged Brando corpulence) in the dying days of the war — introduced ripping the hemming from his wife’s skirt to make a white flag and then defiantly requesting the U.S Army carry his luggage for him — the acting head of the Nazi party is soon tucked away in a drab holding cell while the civilized world contemplates what to even do with accused war criminals like him. Promoting a novel legal theory that the Allied nations can convene a military court to prosecute international crimes perpetrated against the German people and the world at large, Associate Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) begins an arm-twisting campaign that finds him hopscotching the globe: glad-handing in Washington, cajoling foreign governments, and even extorting the Vatican into endorsing what amounts to a show trial that lends an air of legitimacy to an outcome that invariably ends with the execution of the prisoners. And summoned to aid the prosecution, both to establish the competency of Göring and the other prisoners as well as ascertain whether they’re at risk to commit suicide before they stand trial, is the brash Military Intelligence officer and psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek, once again all bug-eyed, twitchy energy).
Despite being based on a real person, Kelley is the sort of only-in-the-movies creation who flirts with mysterious women on the train by dazzling them with card tricks and, when confronted with a bottle containing medication belonging to Göring, identifies the mysterious pills as Codeine by impulsively chomping on one himself (as this moment arrives immediately after a discussion of hidden cyanide capsules found on the prisoners, this sort of behavior should be filed under “reckless to the point of having a death wish”). Kelley intends to break down Göring’s defenses 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 Führer to expose his defense strategy to the prosecution while providing material for the blockbuster book he intends to write about the trial. Yet a funny, if depressingly predictable, thing happens the more time Kelley spends with Göring: faster than you can say “Green Book,” the two men begin to develop a grudging admiration for one another. Before long, Kelley is teaching Göring how to do sleight of hand and sneaking away to visit Göring’s young family on his behalf, all while doctor and patient swap stories of their upbringings. Is Göring merely manipulating Kelley as part of his grand designs to evade the hangman’s noose or is the Malek’s character coming to realize that the impulses that guided the Nazis quest for global domination, fueled by grievances and zero-sum outcomes, is a universal philosophy shared even by his own nation? Essentially, are war crimes more a matter of perspective than morality?
Curiously, as the entire film is about the build-up to a trial, Nuremberg demonstrates little actual interest in its legal proceedings or the strategies undertaken by either the prosecution or the defense. We get much consternation from Jackson (Shannon is uncharacteristically unengaged here as a crusading agent for justice) over the imminent threat of authoritarianism returning should the trials not result in guilty verdicts, but that fails to convey the shooting-fish-in-a-barrel nature of the tribunal; it all comes across with the inflated urgency of those omnipresent fundraising texts that are incessantly sent to voters in the run-up to an election. Ironically, considering Maximilian Schell won a Best Actor Oscar for playing a German defense attorney who approached his role as “devil’s advocate” with considerable relish in the ‘61 film, Vanderbilt entirely omits the legal defense for the accused Nazis, eliding such niceties as cross-examination or calling exonerating witnesses. The closest the film comes to courtroom fireworks is a baffling exchange where Jackson introduced evidence into the record that appears to exonerate Göring with the implication being that the jurist either didn’t read in advance or properly understand the exhibit which he’s built his case around. Instead, the film treats such insights as “Göring will never betray Hitler” as a tactical kill shot or a snare lying in wait to be dramatically sprung. Meanwhile, the central tension of the film is whether the U.S. military can keep the German prisoners from killing themselves before the tribunal has the privilege of doing so under the color of law, which is one of those distinctions without difference that surely means a great deal to legal minds but seems like an awful lot of expended energy over a matter of semantics.
Even those with only a passing knowledge of world history will recognize how little dramatic uncertainty there is in the film’s outcome, and, perhaps in acknowledgment of this, Nuremberg dedicates most of its efforts to underlining present-day parallels between Nazism and the current U.S. administration, with particular echoes in the way the accused deny the existence of atrocities as media inventions or deflecting guilt by claiming ignorance of crimes committed by those working on their behalf. The film even makes the dubious choice of emphasizing the personal parallels between Göring and Trump, both in physical appearance (the porcine build, the swept-back blond hair, the rigid body language) and dispositionally (the arrogance and bluster and, most relevant to the designs of the film, a personability that allows him to disarm his opponents when it’s to his advantage). Of course, Göring also embodies loyalty, introspection, and an abiding love of his family, which is further accentuated by how sympathetically Crowe portrays the High Command of the Luftwaffe; the actor 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. It’s as though the film were encouraging the viewer to think, “You really got to hand it to Göring, at least he’s not as much of a vainglorious and tactless pig as our president.”
Vanderbilt previously directed 2015’s Dan Rather Memogate film Truth, a damp squib of a drama that had the spectacularly poor timing of offering a mealy-mouthed defense of legacy media (in spite of its innate biases) right around the time that half the country started screaming about “fake news.” However, the filmmaker is mostly known for being a high-priced scribe of dreck like The Amazing Spider-Man, the much belated Independence Day: Resurgence, and multiple Scream legacy sequels; Vanderbilt being credited as the sole screenwriter of Zodiac is such a qualitative outlier in his filmography that it all but invites conspiracy theories as to who technically authored the script. Living down to the filmmaker’s reputation, Nuremberg is marred by a smirking patness; most of the characters deliver quippy dialogue as though they were appearing in a screwball comedy where everyone has a snappy comeback at the ready, while scenes are structured around the most hackneyed of comedic setups and payoffs. It’s the sort of film where a character will bemoan that their entire elaborate plan is screwed if the Russians don’t involve themselves, followed immediately by a smash cut to the next scene where a character will excitedly proclaim “the Russians are in!” One could argue the film is trying to use levity to make all its chalky exposition easier to swallow, but it exists far too uncomfortably alongside the gravity of its subject matter, never more evident then when Nuremberg hands itself over to several minutes of documentary footage depicting the liberation of the concentration camps and the sobering details of the obscenities contained within them. The film is so sweaty over-equating the extermination of six million Jews with the bumblefuckery and graft of the Trump White House that it inadvertently ends up diminishing the former while perversely elevating the villainy of the latter. And it’s doing this while simultaneously, and mostly incoherently, condemning the audience for holding itself apart and above literal Nazis, as though the film were arguing for a little more openness and understanding of human nature. Honestly, save it for the Substack.
DIRECTOR: James Vanderbilt; CAST: Rami Malek, Russell Crowe, Michael Shannon, Leo Woodall, John Slattery; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Classics; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 28 min.
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