There’s a dopey gee-whiz tone to director James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg that grows more out of place as the film’s drama unfolds. Based on a true story (and drawn from a non-fiction book), the film has a ring of truth; and its historical figures seem no doubt real in some respects. Yet that Hollywood urge to jazz up the narrative ends up undermining the severity of just what is at stake.
Co-written with Jack El-Hai, Vanderbilt’s take on the famous post-World War II trials centres on a trio of men: lawyer Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon, always effective), psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek, hopelessly miscast again), and Hitler’s second-in-command Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe, having perhaps too much fun). What follows in Nuremberg are some of the details that went into the first international tribunal of its kind, but more pointedly, what was made of Göring as an object of study. Ostensibly, Malek’s Kelley must ensure the Nazi war criminal and his compatriots are fit to stand trial. Instead, the narrative presents a straightforward cat-and-mouse game that undoes the gravity of the matter at hand. That matter, of course, is the Holocaust, which Vanderbilt invokes via graphic and horrifyingly real footage of concentration camps. It’s a powerful choice, but it’s just not so easy to return to a courtroom drama and glib asides after that. The film’s attempt at a complex moral inquiry is ultimately too stunted to be taken seriously. While we know what kind of ending to expect, the film still feels like it gets off on a technicality.
There’s a tension at the heart of Nuremberg that wants to show all its characters as human beings, while also not shying away from their foibles or—as is the case here—their terrible crimes. There’s power to that, and maybe even bravery, too. But the film’s generic trappings make it feel cheap instead. And while the good guys win, it doesn’t quite feel right.
