★★★
History 101: Review of Nuremberg
Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
We all know the famous Santayana quote, “”Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, yet we continue to stupidly ignore—and thereby repeat—our past mistakes. War, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and human trafficking have not only continued to exist—they have thrived. My Lai, Rwanda, The Killing Fields of Cambodia, and now—today—dozens of detention centers presently being planned and built in the United States speak to how little we have learned from our past.
Nuremberg, written and directed by James Vanderbilt, is a film about our past that should resonate deeply with our present. A psychological historical thriller based on the relationship between Nazi war criminal Hermann Goring (Russell Crowe) and U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), this movie seeks to examine the psychology of institutional evil, absolute power, and moral responsibility against the backdrop of the monumental Nuremberg war trials.
As World War II comes to an end, Hermann Goring, second-in-command to Hitler, surrenders to American troops. He is imprisoned at a center designated for officers of the Reich high command, including Rudolf Hess and Robert Ley. Colonel Burton Andrus (John Slattery) assigns Kelley to evaluate the mental health of the inmates. With the help of interpreter Howard Triest (Leo Woodall), he starts evaluating the Goring and the other Nazis.
Meanwhile, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon), advocates for instituting a tribunal for the Nazi war criminals, believing that exposing the scope of the horrors of the Holocaust to the world is a necessary measure to ensure it from happening again. He wants to do this even though the military and the Truman administration favor summary execution of Goring and his cohorts.
After winning over the Pope to his cause (in effect blackmailing him), Jackson starts working with British jurist Sir David Maxwell Fyfe (Richard E. Grant) toward establishing the International Military Tribunal to prosecute the prisoners with crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, conspiracy, and war crimes.
Meanwhile, Kelley begins working with Goring and the others, being told to focus on possible suicidal tendencies among the detainees. Charmed by Goring, Kelley becomes friendly with him and even agrees to deliver letters to his wife and daughter. Kelley works closely with Jackson and Fyfe, who are looking for psychological weaknesses in Goring’s character they can use as ammunition for the state’s case.
Shortly after the trial begins, Jackson shows the courtroom the film footage of the horrors of Dachau, Auschwitz, and other of the concentration camps. Appalled by what he sees, Kelley confronts Goring, who still denies having any knowledge of the atrocities. After accidentally leaking information about his relationship with Goring to the press, Kelley is dismissed from his post as prison psychiatrist but stays on to advise Jackson for the trial.
During his examination of Goring, Jackson is unable to pin down Goring and make him admit his crimes, but during his examination, Fyfe forces him to admit that he would follow Hitler under any circumstance, even if he were alive today. Goring is found guilty, sentenced to death by hanging, as are the other twenty-two Nazi criminals. Before leaving, Kelley visits Goring, affirming Goring’s true nature for himself.
After the war, Kelley writes a book about his experiences at Nuremberg, but traumatized by experiences with Goring and the others, he goes into a decline, becoming an alcoholic and eventually suiciding. At the end, the film’s intertitles state that Jackson’s work in forming the international military tribunal resulted in a precedent which is the basis for prosecution of war crimes today.
Although Nuremberg’s parallel narratives of the personal relationship between Goring and Kelley and the inceptions and creation of the tribunal itself are complexly intertwined, they do not seem fully integrated within the whole of the film. Jackson’s efforts to persuade the military, Congress, and the international community to go ahead with a trial—especially considering the risks of allowing the Nazis to cast themselves in a sympathetic light—is compelling history and great drama.
On the other hand, the bromance between Kelley and Goring (even though it may be historically accurate) does not ring true. Goring is urbane, sophisticated, and charming, and it’s not so difficult to see why Kelley might have been enthralled by him. This version of Kelley, on the other hand, is juvenile and arrogant and not half as smart as he thinks he is—especially compared to his patient. His use of card tricks and elementary magic (even if it is historically accurate) comes across as pathetically sophomoric. Even assuming Goring was playing for Kelley to his own advantage (and he was a master manipulator), it’s difficult to believe he wouldn’t have held the doctor in the greatest contempt, and that his enormous ego wouldn’t have shown it. But perhaps not. Goring did have his uses for the man.
Vanderbilt’s screenplay and direction paint Kelley as little more than a foil for Goring, or, later, for Triest as he recounts his family’s interment and deaths in the camps. Other than that, his “shrewdness” and expertise seem relatively pedestrian. Unfortunately, Malek’s performance does little to deflect this perception. His Kelley’s constant smirk and almost perverse enthusiasm to work with Goring and the Nazis is baffling. In what have been a penetrating and complexly layered psychological study of the magnetism of power and the transience of morality, we are instead given a ham-handed version of a friendship which exists only on the most fundamental level.
Russell Crowe’s Goring, on the other hand, is eminently believable. His surface affability and bonhomie belie the measured brutality and murderous rationality that defined his power. Crowe’s performance is deeply layered and highly complex. From the beginning, when he nonchalantly instructs the G.I.s arresting him to gather his luggage, we are intrigued by how the depths of such a monstrous evil can be housed in such an urbane and sophisticated countenance, and what sort of self-appreciation could fuel such a monstrous ego. Richard E. Grant also hands in a sterling performance as Fyfe.
The production and costume design of the film, set in post-war Germany, is immaculately rendered, but again, this is a history that seems rendered and reduced. The whole film seems a little too tidy—not in the sense of the mise-en-scene—but in the sense that each sequence seems a little too encapsulated and autonomous.
It seemed to me that the characters were giving short summary statements near the end of a scene to reiterate what we’ve just seen, so much so that I reviewed Matt Damon’s YouTube interview where he related how producers asked him to have characters reiterate the plot three or four times within the film so that viewers can follow the plot while using their smartphones, a technique used to keep the attention of viewers who are half-watching the film—a bit of an insult to the filmmakers.
The irony of a filmmaker having to snap his fingers to get the attention of distracted viewers to watch the acts and the trial of the most brutal and horrific criminals of our age—especially when the specter of fascism is presently rising over our land—is distressingly obvious. If history is this boring to our citizens, if they need to have main points repeated to them as if they were third graders, then yes, history will repeat.
Nuremberg is a handsome film, well put together and a painstakingly rendered historical drama. The trial narrative is interesting, but not nearly as compelling as the earlier production Judgement at Nuremberg, perhaps because, like so many films these days, this movie not only tries to bite off more than it can chew in its two-and-one-half hour double narrative, but is not the cautionary tale it could have, and probably should have, been. The trial for the men responsible for the most heinous crimes of modern history should not be overshadowed by a rather pedestrian story of one man infatuated with the face of power—and the carefully homogenized packaging designed to make it palatable to the least common denominator—to make it History 101.
Precise review, right up until you mentioned the spectre of fascism rising in our land. Bye bye credibility.