In Nuremberg, Director James Vanderbilt benefits from a trial that remains relevant and compelling 80 years after it captured the world's attention, the Nuremberg trials of 1945.
The subject is not new to movies; Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) stands as one of the best-known dramas to deal with Nazi war criminals.
Vanderbilt tells a real-life story that's less familiar, basing his movie on the experiences of Douglas M. Kelley, a lieutenant colonel assigned an unusual task. A psychiatrist by trade, Kelley was ordered to evaluate Nuremberg's prisoners, including Hermann Goring, Hitler's second in command.
Meeting with Nazis in dank cells in a bombed-out city was no easy task. Though certain to be sentenced to death, Goring -- played by Russell Crowe -- remained calm and cunning. Crowe plays him as self-assured and arrogant, a man who believes that his inherent power can't be taken away by lesser mortals even in captivity.
Rami Malek portrays Kelley, an Army psychiatrist whose professional ethics are tested when the military asks him to provide "confidential" information that could be used to undermine Goring at trial.
Eager to establish his reputation, the somewhat naive Kelley plans to write a book about his experiences at Nuremberg. Goring accuses the aspiring author of hitchhiking on the infamous reputations of high-ranking Nazis, principally Goring himself. Kelley knows Goring isn't entirely wrong about that.
Kelley's book -- 22 Cells in Nuremberg -- details some of what occurred between Kelley and imprisoned members of the German high command. Kelley hoped to identify the cause of their evil. Surely, such horrendous crimes couldn't have been committed by ordinary men.
The movie, however, isn't based on Kelley's book but on Jack El-Hai's The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Herman Goring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII. That's a long title, and it's matched by a two-hour and 28-minute movie that features Michael Shannon as Robert Jackson, the Supreme Court justice who believed the Nazis should be tried rather than summarily executed. Not everyone shared Jackson's views.
As the movie unfolds, Kelley develops a relationship with Goring. The psychiatrist visited Goring's wife (Lotte Verbeek) and young daughter and treated them sympathetically. He brought Goring letters from his wife and seems shocked when he discovers the depths of Nazi depravity, a reaction that mirrors the way many felt immediately after the war.
We don't get to know a great deal about Kelley, and Jackson receives less attention, although Vanderbilt deals with the political maneuvering required to ensure that the trial was more than the US versus the Nazis. He wanted it to seem as if the world was standing in judgment.
As if to emphasize this point, Richard E. Grant portrays Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, a British deputy chief prosecutor who comes to Jackson's rescue when the American prosecutor is about to be bested by Goring during a tense moment of testimony.
The movie's dramatic high point, the trial, includes real footage from Hitler's death camps, horrific no matter how many times we may have seen such images.
Perhaps to add topical flair, Vanderbilt includes obvious dialogue about the dangers of power-hungry leaders and autocracy. It's as if he's underlining points that are ingrained in the story he's telling. They hardly needed elaboration.
I don't think Nuremberg is the great movie such a momentous subject requires. It can bog down in exposition that tends to be instructional, something on the order of Nuremberg 101.
Still, Vanderbilt's conventional telling of the story is compelling when it needs to be. It also encourages thought about an observation that's not new to the movie or to anyone familiar with Hannah Arendt's oft-cited coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, which occurred 16 years after Nuremberg, and gave rise to Arendt's key phrase, "the banality of evil."
Search as one will, it's impossible to identify traits of malignant exceptionalism that lead ordinary men to such monstrous behavior. Not everyone agrees, but it's still worth pondering.
A footnote: Goring escaped the noose, swallowing a cyanide capsule he had hidden from his captors shortly before he was to be hanged.*
*I've used the spelling of Goring used in the credits, but couldn't figure out how to add the umlaut over the "o" that German requires.
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