In a pivotal scene in James Vanderbildt’s NUREMBERG, it is 1945 and the judge tasked with finding a legal reason to hold an international tribunal to try the defeated Nazi leaders as war criminals has his first meeting with the Army psychiatrist tasked with evaluating the first 22 putative defendants for their fitness to stand trial for war crimes (the phrase crimes against humanity has not yet been coined). It takes place in the deserted and bombed out Nuremberg Stadium, site of massive Nazi rallies, and where the infamous Nuremberg Laws were first proclaimed in 1935. It is the dead of night, and the two men are illuminated only by the headlights of the cars that have brought them there. Dramatic veering into melodrama, yes. Did it happen that way? Probably not. Yet, cinematically, it is perfection as the judge gently explains that a Holocaust that began with laws must also end with them. The conversation, as with so many in this brilliant dialectic on people clinging to their humanity in the face of unspeakable evil, is both expositional for those unfamiliar with this bit of history, and on point as it explicates the thorny dilemma of decency refusing to stoop to the level of that evil.
Rami Malek is that psychiatrist, Dr. Douglas Kelley, an amateur magician, and a man supremely confident in his ability to see through anyone’s subterfuge. His main patient is none other than Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), the highest-ranking Nazi still alive, Hitler’s second-in-command, and a man supremely confident in his ability to control any situation, even from a jail cell. Kelley is all but giddy at the prospect of becoming the world’s only expert on Nazis, and the book deal that will surely follow to make his fortune, he and Goering engage in a series of psychological games with arrogance becoming the Achilles Heel for each of them. Their conversations make for a compelling study of how Fascism took root, despite being led by a second-rate painter and failed soldier.
The case study is unnerving; the performances riveting. Crowe, inflated with obesity prosthetics, is the embodiment of malignant narcissism (Kelley’s diagnosis) positively sparkling with his inflated sense of grandeur and evincing a dangerously charismatic charm. There is condescension and an ability to ingratiate himself with feinted intimacies and vulnerabilities. Crowe has never been better, a chameleon mesmerizing his prey with a bland smile of pure evil and a calculated vulnerability. As for Malek, wide-eyed with venal ambition and with the fascination of being able to make some sort of sense, or at least a diagnosis, for what made the Nazis who they were, and how they took power. As the film progresses, Malek charts the toll it takes on Kelley as he discovers that though sociopaths they certainly were, they were no better or worse than anyone else. A conclusion no one wants to hear, much less believe, and that prompts the Army to bring in another psychiatrist (Colin Hanks) ready to appease his superiors. A definite nod to the slippery slope that led to the Third Reich.
For all its philosophical, political, and legal musings, this is a top-notch entertainment, written with intelligence and sensitivity and a sweeping sense of history. It grapples mightily with issues that, alas, our civilization is still facing 70 years or so on. As a southern writer so aptly put it at around the same time as the events depicted, the past is never dead. It’s not even past. That’s the message Malek ultimately delivers to the Army, in the person of Colonel Burton C. Andrus (John Slattery), the no-nonsense commander of the prison where the Nazis are held, who needs a simple answer and quick executions. That he also represents what a war-weary world needs to move on only adds to the urgency of his conflicts with Kelley.
On the legal side, we have Michael Shannon as Robert H. Jackson, the man explaining his reasoning to Kelley during that dramatic late-night meeting at the Nuremberg stadium. What could have been an exercise in painfully pedantic exposition becomes in Shannon’s able hands, and that of the script, a lively, even piquant, explanation of exactly what the Allies faced in that war-weary post-war world.
It’s easy to forget the quandary. Despite the orders of both Churchill and Roosevelt to shoot Göring on sight, he was taken into custody after surrendering (imperiously) to astonished non-coms at the end of the war, leaving the Allies wondering how to address the scope of the Nazis crimes that included the Holocaust (still just a rumor circulating through classified channel) and invading peaceful countries under the guise of repatriating former German holdings. It wasn’t just a matter of defeating the Third Reich, but of preventing a Fourth Reich. And scrambling to find a legal way to do so to prevent martyrs who might be used to revive the movement.
It begins cerebrally enough, with the legality of a tribunal to try the Nazis and a bone-chilling evaluation of the stakes of losing at trial. The dialogue is intellectually engaging, using wit and rhetorical devices to engage the viewer before the film lowers the boom of exactly what the Nazis did (footage of the camps from the trial are included), turning this theoretical exercise in jurisprudence into a stark reminder of the human consequences of unfettered power. From the general to the very personal as even the Pope dithers on the right thing to do, and Kelley finds that some issues refuse to resolve themselves into something other than a simple dichotomy of Draconian import. NUREMBERG is an engrossing experience, full of twists and turns worthy of the political thrill that it is, refusing to let us off the hook as we watch the best and worst of humanity play out before our eyes.
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