‘Nuremberg’ review: Crowe and Malek in a tonally uncertain Nazi psychodrama

Movies that tell the stories of war criminals on trial are almost always worth making and watching. These films are enlightening (and cathartic) in a way that can almost be considered a public service, and this works best in James Vanderbilt's Nuremberg, about the international tribunal that tried the Nazi high command in the immediate aftermath of World War II. This is a well-intentioned drama that is illuminating despite some missteps.

In his second directorial effort, Vanderbilt, a journeyman writer best known for his “Zodiac” script for David Fincheradapts Jack El-Hay's The Nazi and the Psychiatrist about the curious clinical relationship between Dr. Douglas Kelly, an army psychiatrist, and former German Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering during the lead-up to the Nuremberg trials.

The film stars both Oscar winners: the menacing Russell Crowe as Goering and the squirrel Rami Malek as Kelly. At the end of the war, Kelly is summoned to a special Nazi prison in Luxembourg to evaluate the Nazi commandants. He was immediately intrigued by the idea of ​​trying so many varieties of narcissism.

It becomes clear that the doctor also takes into account his own interests when solving this unique problem. At one point, while jotting down notes in a particularly jarring moment of scriptwriting, Kelly utters the words, “Someone could write a book” and rushes to the library with his German translator, a baby-faced U.S. Army officer named Howie (Leo Woodall), in tow. This book would eventually be published in 1947 as The 22 Cells at Nuremberg – a warning about the possibilities of Nazism in our country, but no one wants to believe that our neighbors might be Nazis until our neighbors become Nazis.

One of the lessons of the Nuremberg Trials – and the movie Nuremberg – is that Nazis are people, too, and the lesson is that people are indeed capable of such horrors (at a crucial moment, the film stops to simply allow the characters and the audience to view devastating footage from a concentration camp). The architects of the Final Solution were humans, not monsters.

But people can also fight it if they want, and the rule of law can prevail if people choose to uphold it. The Nuremberg trials begin because Judge Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) doesn't let anything as inconvenient as a logistical international legal nightmare stop him from doing the right thing.

Kelly's motives are less altruistic. He is fascinated by these people and their pathologies, especially the disarming Goering, and in the name of science the doctor plunges headlong into a deeper relationship with his patient than he should have, ending up sending letters back and forth between Goering and his wife and daughter, still in hiding. He discovers that Goering is only a man – a megalomaniac, arrogant and manipulative man, but only a man. This makes the genocide he helped plan and carry out that much harder to swallow.

Crowe displays a planet-sized gravitational force on screen, which he transfers to the oversized Goering, and Shannon has the same weight. The climactic scene between the two actors, in which Jackson interrogates Goering, is a thrilling piece of legal drama. Malek's energy is unbalanced, his character is always unpredictable. He and Crowe are interesting but unbalanced together.

Vanderbilt strives to give “Nuremberg” a retro appeal that sometimes feels out of place. John Slattery, the colonel in charge of the prison, pours some gravy on his blunt speech, reminiscent of old 1940s films, but the film has been color-corrected to a dull, desaturated gray. It's a stylistic choice meant to give the film the essence of a faded vintage photograph, but it's also ugly as sin.

Vanderbilt struggles to find tone and clutters the film with subplots that hurt the results. Howie's personal story (based on a true story) is deeply affecting, and Woodall delivers it beautifully. But there are also guaranteed female characters: the feisty journalist (Lydia Peckham) who gets Kelly drunk to learn his secrets for a scoop, and Judge Jackson's legal adviser (Renne Schmidt), who cackles and tuts throughout the trial, serving only as someone to whom Jackson can lay his thoughts. Their names are barely spoken in the film, and their subtle inclusion feels almost insulting.

So while the plot makes Nuremberg worth watching, the film itself is a mixed bag, with some great performances (Crowe and Shannon) and some bad ones. He manages to deliver his message at the eleventh hour, but in our cultural moment it feels too late, despite its enduring importance. If the film is meant to be a canary in a coal mine, then that bird has long since died out.

Walsh is the film critic for Tribune News Service.