Stream It or Skip It?

Despite its straightforward title, Nuremberg (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) offers a different angle on the well-trod story of the Nuremberg trials. Writer/director James Vanderbilt uses author Jack El-Hai’s book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist as the basis for a drama about Nazi second-in-command Hermann Goring’s interactions with Douglas Kelley, a real-life American psychiatrist who was tasked with determining whether captured Nazis were mentally fit to stand trial. The film is a parade of heavy hitters, with Goring played by Russell Crowe and Kelley played by Rami Malek; they split time with Michael Shannon as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, who spearheaded the first-ever international tribunal to persecute purveyors of war crimes. Nuremberg is an old-school period Oscar-bait docudrama, but whether it’s more classical in style or corny is the question. 

NUREMBERG: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: It’s May, 1945, Austria. An American soldier has just micturated on a Swastika when a German sedan motors through a throng of citizens and soldiers, the driver waving a scrap of white fabric outside the window. “Jesus Christ, that’s Hermann Goring,” a soldier declares with a tone of disbelief. Cut to: Washington, D.C., where Robert Jackson (Shannon) learns that Goring (Crowe), the Nazis’ highest-ranking commander to survive the end of World War II, has been taken into custody. Jackson pushes back against the Allies’ urges to simply hang Goring and the handful of Nazi officials they’ve captured. They need to be put on trial, Jackson insists. They need to own up to the atrocities they’ve committed. Face the music. Face the world. They slaughtered millions of Jewish people in internment camps. To simply execute them is the easy way to administer justice, but not the right way. 

There’s no legal precedent for what Jackson wants to do, but he pushes ahead anyway. If he has shake down the Pope to get this done, he will – and he does, reminding his Holiness that the Catholic Church publicly supported the Nazi party in 1933. “Did you just blackmail the Pope?” is a question to which Jackson replies thusly: “I don’t wanna talk about it.” Jackson forms a unified legal front with representatives from the U.K., France and the U.S.S.R. It’s is a high-wire act for the Allies. If the shrewd, manipulative Goring can slime his way between the lines of evidence and logic, it’ll only encourage others of his ilk. Jackson and co. not only have to do it right, they have to get it right.

One man knows Goring better than anyone. Douglas Kelley (Malek) is a U.S. Army psychiatrist who we meet on a train in Luxembourg, impressing a pretty American journalist (Lydia Peckham) with card tricks. He’s been brought in to put Rorschach ink blots in front of genocidal mass murderers, and perform other tests to evaluate their sanity, or lack thereof. He brims with confidence upon meeting Goring, well aware of how Hitler’s right-hand pusbag will attempt to eff with him. He helps the tubby pill junkie Goring lose weight and kick his opiate addiction, and agrees to bring letters to Goring’s wife and daughter, hoping it’ll soften the world’s biggest living cretin. It kind of works. The two men play cards. They banter a bit. Kelley shows Goring a sleight-of-hand magic trick. Are they becoming friends? It is, as the proverbial they say, complicated. 

Eventually, Jackson arranges a meeting with Kelley. The judge needs the shrink to report to him. Help him out with this trial. Jackson feels like he could be on shaky ground, and wants to know how Goring will attempt to defend himself. But Kelley pushes back – he took an oath, about doctor-patient confidentiality. A second shrink (Colin Hanks) is brought in, and there’s a bit of competitive conversation about who’s going to write a bestseller about the disturbed, broken mind who signed off on vile atrocities. Eventually, Goring and his comrades have their day in court. But most days in court don’t feature screenings of films depicting thousands of bodies being burned or bulldozed into mass graves. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Judgment at Nuremberg, a 1961 multiple Oscar nominee, is the obvious reference. It’s also not too much of a stretch to compare Crowe’s performance on the courtroom stand to Jack Nicholson’s in A Few Good Men, or his interactions with Malek to Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs. 

Performance Worth Watching: Although the screenplay is a step, maybe a step-and–a-half, away from fully formulating the conflicts within key characters, the leading performances are uniformly strong: Shannon is a solid and unflashy moral foundation for the film, Malek is big and charismatic as a cocky type who finds his moral center amidst this ordeal, and Crowe – in his best work since 2016’s The Nice Guys – is by turns chilling and complicated as the greasy villain.

Sex And Skin: None.

Our Take: Nuremberg is a straight-down-the-middle examination of a smattering of ideas ranging from the nature of evil to the tug-of-war between what’s moral and what’s legal. Should exceptions be made for exceptional situations? How far should good people stretch their standards and convictions to expose bad people? History truly is written by the victors, isn’t it? Vanderbilt plumbed such murky ethical depths in his screenplay for David Fincher’s Zodiac, it’s hard not to be at least slightly disappointed with Nuremberg’s thematic flimsiness. Instead of clawing away at the stuff that makes uncomfortable, the filmmaker seems content to dramatize historical events in a broad manner, and indulge the tropes of courtroom dramas. It’s by no means a bad film, but in spite of its large, talented ensemble cast, relevant subject matter and thoughtful visual approach to storytelling, it’s ultimately an unambitious one.  

Which is to say, it’s absorbing and thoroughly watchable as a classical-style Hollywood docudrama. It’s structured roughly as 70 percent interactions between Malek and Crowe, 30 percent Shannon’s practical, foundational political wranglings. The trial begins at about the halfway mark of a two-and-a-half-hour film that includes memorably showy supporting flourishes by John Slattery (as the Army officer in charge of the Nuremberg Prison) and Richard E. Grant (as British judge Sir David Maxwell Fyfe). Leo Woodall (The White Lotus) plays Kelley’s translator, and the actor’s excellent work and fascinating character arc – potentially more fascinating than Kelley’s, where we never get a decent grip on his motives – feels buried among bigger, showier dramatics. 

Vanderbilt frequently uses some shorthand in his quest to reach his dramatic destination, and for the most part underplays the complexities in the narrative margins and subtext. Frustratingly, he only seems to get to the heart of the Kelley character in a coda where the shrink asserts there was nothing special about these Nazi men, that they were just opportunists riding a slippery moral slope to power and perceived glory – this should be the absolute heart of the film. Vanderbilt is lucky to have Crowe in the Goring role, since the actor’s ability to wordlessly communicate the character’s core hypocrisies humanizes a monster in a way that tests our capacity for empathy – we’re left wrestling with the notion that he was as devoted to his family as he was to Hitler. But for the most part, as a reenactment and embellishment of historical events, Nuremberg serves its function in an entertaining manner.

Our Call: You’ll wish Nuremberg was more willing to get its hands dirty in exploring the inner lives of its characters, and less willing to conform to genre standards. But it’s a rock-solid watch nonetheless. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.