The Nuremberg trials have inspired filmmakers before, from Stanley Kramer’s 1961 drama to the 2000 television miniseries with Alec Baldwin and Brian Cox. But for the latest take, “Nuremberg,” writer-director James Vanderbilt focuses on a lesser-known figure: The U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who after the war was assigned to supervise and evaluate captured Nazi leaders to ensure they were fit for trial (and also keep them alive). But his is a name that had been largely forgotten: He wasn’t even a character in the miniseries.
Kelley, portrayed in the film by Rami Malek, was an ambitious sort who saw in this assignment an opportunity to write a book (bestselling, he hoped) on his findings about the men who committed such atrocities. Over several months he conducted many hours interviews and Rorschach tests with the inmates, including fallen Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering ( Russell Crowe ), who proved an especially fascinating subject as the highest ranking official still living.
The film, in theaters Friday, centers on a series of conversations between Kelley and Goering, who develop something almost like a friendship — or at least a temporary understanding. It’s interesting, morally murky territory fitting of the filmmaker best known as the screenwriter of “Zodiac” that does gesture toward some provocative ideas — including the very concept of war tribunals overseen by the victors. But it can’t quite synthesize its classical form with the bleak, sobering truths at its core.
Crowe, who speaks both German and English in the film, is well suited to playing this charismatic, larger-than-life egoist who believes he can outwit those around him. Curious choices are made, though, about what to tell of his transgressions during the war and the angelic representation of his wife and daughter in hiding.
Goering is likely not as much of a household name as “Nuremberg” seems to assume, but Crowe does get to do some of his best work in years. Malek, wild-eyed as ever, portrays Kelley as an overconfident opportunist who is more than willing to cross lines to gain Goering’s trust. Are we rooting for him, though? Not exactly.
You might think that these chats would be the kinds you don’t want to leave — a meeting of two unique minds trying to figure one another out, and yet there’s a spark and intrigue lacking. An unnerving descent into the mind of Hitler’s right hand man this is not. Instead, they talk about fathers and greatness and sometimes magic tricks. Perhaps that’s why Vanderbilt, who based his film on Jack El-Hai’s book “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist,” broadens his scope beyond the prison cell to include the story of how the unprecedented trial came together, with Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson (a very good Michael Shannon) leading the charge to build a case against the Nazi leaders.
What results is a familiar historical drama, weaving together many various characters in the buildup to the climactic courtroom showdown. With an expansive and recognizable ensemble cast, including Richard E. Grant as the British lawyer Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, John Slattery as the commandant of Nuremberg prison, Colin Hanks as another psychiatrist brought into the fold (Gustave Gilbert, whose writings would eclipse Kelley’s) and Leo Woodall as a German speaking U.S. officer, “Nuremberg,” stately and sober, is what we might have called Oscar-bait once upon a time.
The most fascinating character is probably Woodall’s, but the real story of Sgt. Howie Triest, a German Jewish emigre, is used as a reveal late in the film to motivate a humiliated Kelley to “do the right thing” and help Jackson and the lawyers bring Goering to justice.
Oddly, the trial is filmed like a standard courtroom drama, resorting to cliches and a rousing but hollow “we got him” moment that feels antithetical to the film’s larger point, that there is little glory in the charade and the convictions. At the end of it all is death anyway.
What does it say about a nearly two-and-a-half hour drama when the 80-year-old footage from inside Nazi concentration camps that was shown inside the real courtroom is the most compelling and memorable sequence? Perhaps in these days of Holocaust denial, it’s never a bad idea to remind people of the truth. But will anyone harboring those assumptions stumble upon “Nuremberg” and, if they do, make it that far into the film?
Kelley would go on to write that book, “22 Cells in Nuremberg,” but his chilling conclusions were not exactly embraced in that postwar moment. He did not find monsters or psychopaths in those cells, after all, but instead saw essentially normal people. Kelley wrote a warning: “I am convinced that there is little in America today which could prevent the establishment of a Nazi-like state.”
“Nuremberg,” a Sony Pictures Classics release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for “the Holocaust, some language, violent content, smoking, brief drug content, some disturbing images, suicide.” 148 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.
