Against all odds, Hollywood has a pretty decent track record when it comes to depicting world history. Of course, no movie can capture a major historical event with full faithfulness and complete comprehensiveness, but the best ones get the big things right. Does anyone doubt that Communism was as bad as it was presented in David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago or that the Normandy landing was something like how it was depicted in the bloody, terrifying, numbing opening of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan? These movies may make all manner of concessions to dramatic structure, narrative expediency, and entertainment value, but in giving a sense of the sweep of large events, they often have a certain practical value — teaching tools for an increasingly and worryingly post-literate society.
The new drama Nuremberg is an honorable entrant in this long-standing filmmaking tradition. With intelligence, vigor, and attentiveness to the historical record, writer-director James Vanderbilt recreates the preparation for, and prosecution of, the Nuremberg war trials, which, in 1945 and 1946, sought to impose the severest of legal consequences for the barbaric actions of high-ranking Nazi officials during the Second World War. Earlier film accounts of this period include Stanley Kramer’s fictionalized Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and the made-for-cable movie Nuremberg (2000), which, in what feels like a lifetime ago, starred Alec Baldwin as Robert H. Jackson, the Supreme Court justice who stepped into the role of prosecutor during the trials.
This time, Vanderbilt shifts the focus from the legal proceedings to the psychology of the defendants. Foremost among them, in his own mind and in the universe of the film, is Nazi leader Hermann Goering, who is played by a portly, lordly Russell Crowe as a man impenitent of his crimes, confirmed in his hatreds, and secure in his own importance. Instead of positioning a legal adversary against Goering, Vanderbilt drew upon Jack El-Hai’s 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist to frame the story as a kind of extended multileveled duologue between Goering and American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek). Among the principal duties of Kelley is to confirm the mental fitness and ensure the survival of the accused Nazis until they enter the courtroom and can be delivered certain punishment. Upon his arrival at the secret military prison in which the remnant Nazi leadership is housed, Kelley is reminded that both Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler swallowed cyanide in preference to facing justice. Kelley is told that Goering and his fellow defendants cannot be permitted to choose the same justice-evading fate.
Malek, an Oscar winner for playing Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, has the right countenance to deliver a line like this: “Sir, I’m a good doctor, but the entire Nazi high command might be a little beyond my expertise.” Flashes of wit aside, Kelley quickly comprehends that in order to accomplish that which has been asked of him, he cannot treat Goering and the other prisoners as stick-figure enemies. For example, Kelley plays on Goering’s ego to induce him to lose weight to improve his health; when he suffers the symptoms of a heart attack, the Nazi leader refuses the aspirin pill Kelley offers — presumably assuming it is laced with some poisonous substance — until the psychiatrist himself chews it. Less out of compassion than a desire to see the accused in a state of sufficient fitness to stand trial, Kelley also facilitates communications between Goering and his wife, Emmy (Lotte Verbeek). Such details keep the film lively and thought-provoking, even when its subject matter has been well trod.
Soon, Kelley recognizes that his close study of Goering and the other captured Nazis will be in furtherance of the work of the prosecutors, including, most prominently, Justice Jackson, who is nicely played with shambling yet commanding modesty by Michael Shannon. After leaning heavily on the Catholic Church to support the war trials, someone asks Jackson, “Did you just blackmail the pope?” Jackson replies, quietly, “I don’t want to talk about it.” Meanwhile, Kelley dispatches an aide to the library to become better acquainted with the rancid ideology that informed the Nazis’ savagery. But, above all, he gains knowledge from his own eyes and ears. At one point, Goering is presented with an inkblot, in whose amorphous contours he perceives “10,000 horses.” This is a man for whom a projection of confidence is everything. Upon being taken to a dingy cell to await the now-imminent prosecution, Goering praises its German construction. It has been some time since Crowe has been as alert or as terrifying in a part. Kelley helps set the stage for Jackson to prosecute Goering, cautioning him that the man, though a monster, might exploit any opportunity to pontificate on the witness stand. Jackson is undaunted. “This war ends in a courtroom,” he says.
That’s more or less where the movie ends up, too. Vanderbilt expertly recreates the courtroom’s physical details (such as the accused Nazis in the dock), and underscores, above all, the proceedings’ moral necessity. Shannon finds the right notes of dignity and indignation as Jackson, but the most startling sequence comes when real film footage of the Nazi concentration camps is shown as evidence in court for a prolonged period (and, thus, to us). Among the participants in the trial, Richard E. Grant, as British prosecutor David Maxwell Fyfe, is especially compelling. The trial ends where it had to: with conviction and the imposition of sentences of death, though Goering, too weak to face the hangman’s noose, manages to choose death by cyanide after all.
By this point, Kelley has taken a backseat in the story, and Malek a backseat in the film, but there can be no doubt of the role he had in history. In 1947, Kelley wrote a book about his experiences and observations at Nuremberg, 22 Cells in Nuremberg: A Psychiatrist Examines the Nazi Criminals. That, 11 years later, Kelley took his own life using the same means as Goering is mentioned but left unexplained; there could be a fascinating film in the examination of the psychiatrist’s own evidently tortured psychology.
As it stands, Nuremberg illustrates this pivotal episode of the free world’s reckoning with evil with urgency, clarity, and skill.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.
