The principal psychological contest in “Nuremberg,” a drama about the Nazi war crimes trials, takes place not in the courtroom but in a jail, where an American psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), tries to pick the brains of the defendants.
Officially, Kelley, a U.S. Army major, has the task of ensuring that these members of the Nazi elite remain mentally fit for trial. But he also has a professional interest in understanding how their minds work. “If we could psychologically define evil, we could make sure something like this never happens again,” he excitedly explains to an interpreter, Sgt. Howard Triest (Leo Woodall).
But what Kelley finds, to his surprise, is that the Nazis aren’t unusual from a psychiatric perspective — that the horrors they perpetrated cannot be blamed on a uniquely German mass psychosis. Kelley even finds himself beginning to like Hermann Goering (Russell Crowe), Hitler’s second-in-command, who explicitly confides in him as a friend.
Goering is likely playing his own mind games, knowing that Kelley is torn between his duty as a soldier — to divulge information to the prosecutors — and his duty as a doctor, to maintain his patients’ privacy. Only in the film’s centerpiece, when Goering shields his eyes with sunglasses during a courtroom screening of concentration camp footage, does Kelley seem to realize what a monster he has warmed to.
Stanley Kramer’s “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961), based on later trials, relied on purely fictional characters to make its points. The ostensibly more responsible “Nuremberg” uses real names and places, but it leans on contrivances so heavily it might as well have gone the Kramer route. That’s a disappointment, because the movie was written and directed by James Vanderbilt, the screenwriter of “Zodiac,” adapting a book by Jack El-Hai. That 2007 film streamlined a complicated set of personalities and facts into a thrilling procedural. “Nuremberg” struggles to make dramatic sense of an even denser mass of material.
Instead, we get egregiously undisguised exposition (“Jesus Christ, that’s Hermann Goering!” an American says when Goering pulls up in a Mercedes and surrenders in the opening scene); characters conveniently forgetting their obligations (Kelley drunkenly blabs his doubts about the prosecution’s abilities to a journalist); and basic information, like Triest’s identity as a German-born Jew, being withheld until Vanderbilt can deploy it as a surprise.
The other main thread follows the Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon, in the film’s least embarrassing performance), who served as the chief prosecutor for the United States, and his efforts to establish a legal basis for the tribunal. The scene in which he personally accuses Pope Pius XII of hypocrisy to pressure him into supporting the trials is just one of many interludes that strain credulity, at least as played.
And while the real Jackson is often said to have had trouble pinning down Goering during cross-examination, even a cursory glance at the real-life transcript reveals that what took place was not as hapless as what transpires onscreen. Fortunately, Jackson has the British prosecutor David Maxwell-Fyfe (Richard E. Grant) to bail him out. “I couldn’t beat him — not without help,” Jackson tells Kelley after the Goering ordeal. Evidently, as this muddled movie tells it, the climactic lesson of the Nuremberg trials was that America had a friend, too.
Nuremberg
Rated PG-13. Footage and descriptions of Nazi atrocities. Running time: 2 hours 28 minutes. In theaters.
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