Movie Review: 'Nuremberg' Brings a Sting of Recognition

Talk about a movie that speaks to the times...

Writer-director James Vanderbilt, drawing on Jack El-Hai’s 2013 nonfiction book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, zeroes in on one specific aspect of the Nuremberg Trials: The assessment of Hitler’s second-in-command, Hermann Göring, by an Army Military Intelligence Corps psychiatrist named Douglas Kelley, and the relationship that developed between the two — a cat-and-mouse-tinged almost-friendship that, as the film depicts it, mixed admiration and contempt.

(Rami Malek and Russell Crowe in Nuremberg. Sony Pictures Classics)

Göring (Russell Crowe) surrenders to American forces early in the movie, but he is neither abject nor raving, like some of his fellow travelers; rather, he announces himself proudly, going to far as to treat U.S. soldiers as if the were porters at a hotel. Later, confined to a holding cell in Nuremberg, he looks his new accommodations up and down approvingly: The place is the work of German architects and builders. It will do.

This is not a man who fears the hangman’s noose, Kelley (Rami Malek) realizes. The affable, yet cunning, Göring seems to think he holds all the cards. But what is his game, and what is his goal?

The strutting Kelley is counterbalanced by an earnest and dutiful translator, Sgt. Howie Triest (Leo Woodall, proving there’s more considerably more to him than sexy “White Lotus” window dressing). A more easy, less fraught friendship develops between these men, too, as Triest accompanies Kelley on a series of unexpected side trips to libraries and to the house where Göring’s wife and daughter are staying. Kelley has brilliant insights to share about the Nazi war criminal, and the blustering colonel (John Slattery) to which he and Triest both report is going to need those insights if prosecuting attorney (and Supreme Court Justice) Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon) is going to establish a whole new kind of case law and secure a guilty conviction against him. But the self-serving Kelley has a way of sabotaging himself, and his professional ambitions threaten to roadblock his effectiveness. To his credit, Kelley does have qualms when he’s asked to compromise his professional ethics — his superiors want him to hand over key insights gleaned from his time with Göring. He’s not so reticent when it comes to hoarding those insights for a book he plans to write, though, which begs the question of whether Kelley is as much of a narcissist as the man he’s assessing.

(Leo Woodall in Nuremberg. Sony Pictures Classics)

But even Kelley can see that the trial is too important to lose. If Jackson can’t nail Göring, Nazism may rise once again, and sooner than anyone would think…

The film lands some commentary on contemporary politics with all the finesse of a haymaker, but it’s not wrong to do so. More irritating is the way characters decipher clues and tells that the audience easily identifies, only to then trumpet them as though they were deductions worthy of Sherlock Holmes. Together, these two propensities give the movie a remedial quality, a sense that we’re having everything spelled out to us in slow, careful syllables.

Then again, if America — and other nations, as well — weren’t in need of remedial history, would we find ourselves where we are now?

This is an awards-worthy movie, and it’s clearly meant to be. It’s also flawed, and a little arrogant… not unlike Kelley himself. But it also possesses a crafty side, giving us character complexity and emotional resonance that drives its messaging home far more effectively than its sometimes-preachy politics.

Nuremberg opens Nov. 7 in theaters.