There was a TV miniseries called Nuremberg I remember watching in high school history class as a way of teaching us students about the Nuremberg Trials. It featured Alec Baldwin and Christopher Plummer, and I remember Brian Cox was Herman Göring -the most significant figure of those hearings pretty much exactly as he wanted. The Nazi Reichsmarschall, last of Hitler’s innermost circle not to commit suicide before answering for his crimes, wanted to be the main character of that chapter of history regardless of what happened to him. Much as the trials were designed to diminish and discredit the Nazis, it can be argued their effect historically was more complex.
That’s not what James Vanderbilt’s movie Nuremberg believes, much as it gives credence to the complicated aspects of the Nuremberg Trials in terms of their apparent goal. Vanderbilt sees such a thing as purveyor of drama, but doesn’t seem to take seriously its validity all that much. His movie’s attitude towards Nuremberg still predominantly leans towards the commonly accepted liberal notion of its essential function of Nazi accountability, justice, and the groundwork of modern international law. It is a work valourizing the process and execution of the trial -of Göring in particular, while also attempting a conversation on his character, motivations, and nature of evil. The somewhat lacklustre results here feed a fairly shallow portrait on the stand.
At the start of the film it would appear that the focal point is Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) the jurist who essentially conceives the idea of the Nuremberg Trials when others are adamant about simply executing the Nazi leaders, and who of course would eventually serve as chief prosecutor himself. The basis and architecture of the trials as well as the backing it requires of the allied powers is all explored before proceedings even get to the introductions of psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) and the imprisoned Göring (Russell Crowe) whose interactions are meant to be the film’s backbone of complexity. In a number of sessions, Kelley interviews and even attempts to strategically befriend Göring as part of his psychoanalysis, warning Jackson that the Nazi leader is very capable of presenting himself in a sympathetic light and that his cross-examination could very well just wind up a platform for an ideological martyr.
The necessity of the process going the Allies’ way -specifically the Americans’- is heavily stressed; and the movie does well in handling the theme of the gravity of historical consequences. Jackson makes the point that after the First World War, the brutal conditions imposed by the great powers and the Treaty of Versailles on the Germans directly led to the ascendancy of the Nazis, and that the conduct in the aftermath of this war mattered. Though the movie appears to battle differing ideas here in terms of Nuremberg's place in history. Because the idealism in Jackson's motivation and what the movie ultimately tries to make a defining statement is counteracted by several of the scenes between Kelley and Göring and the conclusions the former eventually reaches.
Though maybe that predominant motive about Nuremberg is why these parts of the film are so shallow. Crowe gives a great performance as Göring, embodying both his sense of assumed authority and (as Kelley notes) his malignant narcissism, while also capturing the charisma that Kelley is so compelled by, to the dismay of his colleagues -though Malek himself does not even appear to know how far Kelley is swayed by the Nazi, playing some scenes like a genuine friend, others like merely an impartial student of his behaviour -the line is likely meant to blur. But for this complexity there is little to be found in the ethics towards the Holocaust, which is supposed to be the key point of these discussions -Göring's complicity a critical thing to prove in the trials as he shifts almost all blame and knowledge onto Hitler and Heinrich Himmler. But Kelley barely ever debates him on these kinds of matters. The movie is afraid to go certain places. It’ll normalize Göring, but not so much so that his villainy is anything but exceptional. It’ll raise the point of America’s sins in the war -namely the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but only as a frame in relation to the Holocaust where it can steer clear of suggesting those acts were cruel or unnecessary. The movie wants to raise complex ideas, but hasn’t the courage to actually follow through. For all the talk of how persuasive Göring will be on the witness stand, there’s nothing in his presentation that rises to the level of the ordinary or unusual -the things that prompted Hannah Arendt’s instrumental ‘banality of evil’ thesis. Because it is easier and less controversial for these aspects to be scrubbed from the movie. And given this is a film made by a Vanderbilt that shouldn’t be very surprising.
The way it handles the Holocaust in general is a bit strange, with the gravity and enormity of it understood by some and not others. It is not until actual footage of the liberated camps is shown to the court that Kelley seems to actually grasp what happened and promptly changes his tune with how he approaches Göring -but it is frankly unbelievable that he either didn’t get it or this is all it took for him to drop any facade of civility. Likewise the story of his translator assistant Howie Triest (Leo Woodall), a German Jew who had been sent to America early in the war and whose parents likely died in the concentration camps, is revealed with a lack of grace that seems to suggest both Kelley and the audience need further convincing.
Vanderbilt’s filmmaking is curious, occasionally marked by technical creativity -such as in a great inventive match cut between a cigarette and a puddle- while elsewhere it is rather plain and even a touch hacky. Given the subject matter one can understand the impulse to have a little bit of levity in the film, such as in scenes with John Slattery’s colonel keeping a watch on suicidal prisoners, and one bit after a discussion between Jackson and Pope Pius XII, referencing his earlier role in the Riechskonkordat between Nazi Germany and the Vatican, the observance that he essentially blackmailed the pope. Occasional bits like this and ones related to the general architecture of the Trials are fine, but the film employs a few too many ironic juxtapositions of editing -sitcom-like tactics of saying one thing but cutting immediately to the opposite action or sentiment. It becomes a very bizarre thing to observe in a movie about accountability for the Holocaust.
The end of the film makes a point to show Kelley warning Americans in a radio interview of the potential of American fascism given his observances of Göring -and it feels like an eleventh hour attempt to tie in a cautionary and very relevant theme that is cogent, but not supported by the movie’s text up to that point. It could have been, but Vanderbilt chose not to go that route, instead leaning mostly in the general direction of American exceptionalism in spite of the country’s sins (and yet also shows Richard E. Grant’s British Maxwell Fyfe as the instrumental figure of the climax). Nuremberg is a movie of very confused intents as it vacillates between its intimate focus on the relationship of Kelley and Göring and a broader illustration of the trial process itself. It cowers from some of its more complex implications and the result is a movie that doesn’t say much of anything or present its material in any more dramatic a fashion than a strictly educational reenactment might.
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