Courtroom thriller Nuremberg is guilty on all counts – with the exception of Russell Crowe
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Russell Crowe as Hermann Goring, centre, in a scene from Nuremberg.Scott Garfield/The Associated Press
Nuremberg
Directed by James Vanderbilt
Written by James Vanderbilt, based on the book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai
Starring Rami Malek, Michael Shannon and Russell Crowe
Classification N/A; 148 minutes
Opens in theatres Nov. 7
There are two wildly different movies fighting for justice in James Vanderbilt’s new Second World War courtroom drama Nuremberg – and both feature a strange but unshakable Alec Baldwin connection.
The first feels much like the last time that Hollywood tried to dramatize the events of the trial of the century, with the 2000 television miniseries, also titled Nuremberg, starring Baldwin as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson and Brian Cox as Adolf Hitler’s second in command Hermann Goring – two well-cast performers going toe to toe in a slick legal thriller that condensed complex history to a respectable degree.
The second movie nestled inside this new version of Nuremberg, though, is akin to something out of an episode of Baldwin’s old sitcom 30 Rock, which did a nice job skewering the kind of big ol’ dumb movies in which characters nonsensically spout exposition and everything, even the horrors of genocide, can be wrapped up in a neat little bow if it had a swelling score and sexy actors.
Of course, neither of those two movies can co-exist, and so Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg keeps coming together and then falling apart, a grave miscalculation of a production that tries to respect its source material at the same time that it assumes its audience is a collected band of morons. What’s worse: There’s not even a cameo from Baldwin.
What we get instead are a handful of actors who deserve better (Michael Shannon, Richard E. Grant, Leo Woodall, Colin Hanks), some who don’t deserve much at all given how badly they mangle the already pitiful dialogue that they’re handed (Rami Malek, John Slattery), and one who seems wildly miscast only to then prove himself to be the sole performer who genuinely understands and explores the responsibility that he is given.
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Rami Malek plays a U.S. Army psychiatrist named Douglas Kelley in Nuremberg.Scott Garfield/The Associated Press
That last fella is, perhaps surprisingly, Russell Crowe, whose casting as Goring initially seems to be a terrible joke. The one-time Gladiator Maximus Decimus Meridius, reduced to cosplaying a bulging Nazi in his final days. Yet as the film goes on – with Goring spending most of his time awaiting trial verbally sparring with a U.S. Army psychiatrist named Douglas Kelley (Malek) – it is Crowe who nails what Vanderbilt seems to be going for yet cannot achieve himself: a layered exploration of the moral binaries that govern society, and which some men live to obliterate. Crowe even nails the German accent, or at least more than, say, whatever transatlantic accent that his co-star Lydia Peckham (as a journalist trying to pry details from Kelley) is trying on.
Whenever Crowe is not on the screen, though, the film is overwhelmed by atrocious tonal shifts and faux-clever interjections. (Just after a newscaster announces that U.S. prosecutors “better not run into any problems” with Goring, a character announces, “We have a problem.”) This constant rib-poking – as if Vanderbilt is truly unsure whether or not contemporary audiences know the very bare-bones basics of 20th-century history – is not so much annoying as it is insulting.
Vanderbilt comes to Nuremberg boasting a remarkably up-and-down screenwriting C.V. – the fantastic thriller Zodiac and the underrated action-comedy The Rundown, but also the dreadful trifecta of Basic, Truth, and Independence Day: Resurgence – and the peaks and valleys are on full, inglorious display as Nuremberg trudges along. There are multiple endings of various potency, secondary characters who bizarrely drop out of the proceedings, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the real-life tension that drove so much of the trial’s backroom machinations, with the most fascinating element of the central Goring-Kelley relationship reduced to a quick line of end-credit text.
Considering the subject matter, it would be far too glib to suggest that Vanderbilt’s film is a cinematic mistrial. Yet given that the movie itself reduces history to a series of quips and tropes, maybe not. Guilty as charged.
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Crowe seems to nail whatever filmmaker James Vanderbilt was going for in Nuremberg.Kata Vermes/The Associated Press
