Copyright Chicago Tribune
Movies that depict the history of war criminals on trial will almost always be worth making and worth watching. These films are edifying and cathartic in a way that could almost be considered a public service, and that’s what works best in James Vanderbilt’s “Nuremberg,” about the international tribunal that put the Nazi high command on trial in the immediate wake of World War II, a film that is well-intentioned and elucidating, despite some of its missteps. For his second directorial effort, Vanderbilt, a journeyman screenwriter best known for his “Zodiac” screenplay, adapts “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist” by Jack El-Hai, about the curious clinical relationship between Douglas Kelley, an Army psychiatrist, and former German Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, in the lead up to the Nuremberg trials. The film is a two-hander between Oscar winners: a formidable Russell Crowe as Göring, and a squirrely Rami Malek as Kelley. At the end of the war, Kelley is summoned to an ad hoc Nazi prison in Mondorf-Les-Bains, Luxembourg, to evaluate the Nazi commandants, and he’s intrigued at the thought of studying so many flavors of narcissist. But it becomes clear that he has his own self-interest in mind with this unique task as well. At one point, while recording notes, in a moment of particularly on-the-nose screenwriting, he verbalizes, “someone could write a book,” and off he dashes to the library, with his German interpreter, a baby-faced U.S. Army officer named Howie (Leo Woodall) in tow. The book would eventually be published in 1947 as “22 Cells in Nuremberg,” a warning about the possibilities of Nazism in our own country, but no one wants to believe our neighbors can be Nazis until our neighbors are Nazis. One of the lessons of the Nuremberg trials — and of “Nuremberg” the film — is that Nazis are people too, with the lesson being that human beings are indeed capable of such horrors (the film grinds to an appropriate halt in a crucial moment to simply let the characters, and audience, take in devastating concentration camp footage). Human beings, not monsters, were the architects of the Final Solution. But human beings can also fight against this, if they choose to, and the rule of law can prevail, if people make the choice to uphold it. The Nuremberg trials start because Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) doesn’t let anything so inconvenient as a logistical international legal nightmare stop him from doing what’s right. Kelley’s motivations are less altruistic. He is fascinated by these men and their pathologies, particularly the disarming Göring, and in the name of science, or legal arguments, the doctor dives headlong into a deeper relationship with his patient than he should, eventually ferrying letters back and forth between Göring and his wife and daughter, in hiding. He finds that Göring is just a man, a megalomaniacal, arrogant and manipulative man, but just a man. That makes the genocide that he helped to plan and execute that much harder to swallow. Crowe has a planet-sized gravitational force on screen that he lends to the outsize Göring, and Shannon possesses the same gravitas. A climatic scene between these two actors where Jackson cross-examines Göring is a riveting piece of courtroom drama. Malek’s energy is unsettled, his character always unpredictable. He and Crowe are interesting, but unbalanced, together. Vanderbilt strives to imbue “Nuremberg” with retro appeal that sometimes feels misplaced. John Slattery, as the colonel in charge of the prison, throws some sauce on his snappy patter dialogue that harkens back to old movies from the 1940s, but the film has been color-corrected into dull desaturated gray. It’s a stylistic choice to give the film the essence of a faded vintage photograph, but it’s also ugly as sin. Vanderbilt struggles to find a tone, and clutters the film with extra storylines to mixed results. Howie’s personal history (based on a true story) is deeply affecting, and Woodall sells it beautifully. But then there are the underwritten female characters: a saucy journalist (Lydia Peckham) who gets Kelley drunk to draw out his secrets for a scoop, and Justice Jackson’s legal clerk (Wrenn Schmidt) who clucks and tsks her way through the trial, serving only as the person to whom Jackson can articulate his thinking. Their names are scarcely uttered during the film, and their barely there inclusion feels almost offensive. So while the subject matter makes “Nuremberg” worth the watch, the film itself is a mixed bag, with some towering performances (Crowe and Shannon), and some poor ones. It manages to eke out its message in the eleventh hour, but it feels too little too late, in our cultural moment, despite its evergreen importance. If the film is intended to be a canary in a coal mine, that bird has long since expired. Katie Walsh is a critic for Tribune News Service.
