WWII Criminals Face the Rami-fications in 'Nuremberg'

Rami Malek, you have charmed me with your middlebrow taste.

In 2019, Malek won an Academy Award for a cartoonish and parodic portrayal of Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody – a homophobic movie directed by an alleged pedophile – and has spent the six years since his win on side quests. After a three year break, mostly imposed by the pandemic, Malek returned to the screen as a co-lead in The Little Things and as Daniel Craig’s final Bond villain in No Time to Die. His performance in the former is oddly restrained for a movie as dementedly constructed as it is, while his performance in the latter plays to the rafters and is drawn from an entirely separate and more Brosnan Bond-era movie altogether. After a supporting turn in Oppenheimer, Malek has finally staked his claim as a leading man with The Amateur and Nuremberg in order to declare: “I am your dad’s favorite actor.”

Nuremberg, written and directed by James Vanderbilt, comes over 60 years after Stanley Kramer’s iconic Judgment at Nuremberg and doesn’t make the strongest case for its existence, yet still properly entertains and extolls warnings to heed. Based on Jack El-Hai’s The Nazi and the Psychologist, Nuremberg sees Vanderbilt takes a historian’s lens to the trial that reckoned with the Holocaust on the world stage and ultimately shaped how the planet dealt with war crimes for the next 80 years. A true journeyman filmmaker, Vanderbilt’s authoritative but pedestrian hand is clear from the opening minutes of context-doling in which Russell Crowe’s Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring is arrested by the American officers who, seconds earlier, pissed on a swastika-plastered tank hull. Such a straightforward opening would be eschewed by most en-vogue directors, but Vanderbilt’s pride in being nowhere near association with more daring artistry is genuinely refreshing.

In Nuremberg’s refusal to subvert, in its enthusiasm to be lauded with AARP Movies for Grownups Awards and adored by senior citizens at Landmark Theaters across the country, there is a genuine and revelatory joy to be found watching a dim, overlong, highly competent middlebrow drama about the evil of the Holocaust. It also helps that Russell Crowe can’t decide on an accent.

Vanderbilt’s depiction of the Nuremberg trials focuses on the relationship between Crowe’s Göring and Malek’s Douglas Kelley, the chief psychologist who built a relationship with Göring during his imprisonment in order to analyze him, in part for the U.S. military and the prosecuting Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson – portrayed by the sturdy-as-oak Michael Shannon – and in part for himself, and a book he planned to write. The trials are still the draw here, but they comprise the back half of the movie. It is Malek and Crowe’s push and pull that bafflingly stands at the heart of the movie.

Most depictions of the Nuremberg trials, wisely, opt for the tried and true courtroom drama, excising the pains of the unfathomable evils perpetuated by the Nazi regime in a legal environment, thus permitting a cast of actors to shred each other apart. Kramer understood this in 1961, though his film was based on the subsequent trials, and TNT knew this in 2001 – because they know drama. Vanderbilt’s more interpersonal approach is fascinating for its simplicity of construction and presentation, but also for its genuine interest in the psychology of what having to look evil in the face may do to a man.

Crowe, as he has done for the past 10 years, dives deep into the river of ham as if he is fishing for treasure alongside Kevin Costner. Is that attitude insensitive? Maybe. It’s entertaining as hell, though, and a real treat to watch one of Hollywood’s finest cornballs understand that evil should sometimes be laughed at. Göring was an embarrassing failure of a man and Crowe’s wackadoo accent and posturing fits the bill. Similar to Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter (1955), Crowe can be genuinely terrifying as an embodiment of the truest evil, yet is never more than a buffoon whose commitment to his fascistic cause is his downfall. Crowe’s lack of even-handedness does the film well, especially in the front-loaded first half whose quality teeters on the precipice of a TV movie.

After Göring’s unsubtle arrest, Vanderbilt goes through the motions of his arraignment and transport as we meet our cast of characters, and as John Slattery makes a meal out of his every moment as Burton C. Andres, the commandant of the Nuremberg prison. Then, near disastrously, Rami Malek enters the picture, as if he were doing a Tom Cruise impression. Pulling off sleight-of-hand magic with an attempted cocksure swagger while sporting a leather coat and shades that are undoubtedly wearing him, Malek arrives as if he were auditioning for A Few Good Men. It seems to be an attempt to win over an audience – yet we’ve already been won over by that soldier who pissed on a swastika, and when Michael Shannon opened his mouth!

Thankfully, much like the intentional off-footing of Benedict Cumberbatch in The Power of the Dog, there is some real sleight-of-hand with Malek’s casting. Kelley’s bravado is stacked so delicately as to all come crashing down when face to face with Göring. Yet, this opening hour-and-change of the film moves at its own clip. It’s not slow enough so as molasses couldn’t catch up, but it does parlay in Netflix miniseries style asides and expository dumps. Vanderbilt’s eye is wonky and he, at points, quite literally loses the plot.

Yet, as the two men’s relationship builds and as the Nazis’ cowardice makes itself more evident, Vanderbilt digs in. After boundless conversations with each other, the now intertwined men must part and the trials must begin. It’s in the safety of the courtroom that Vanderbilt cranks it and goes to town like any good journeyman should. The courtroom is the bread and butter of the B+ movie, something that rarely exists now.

In a starved ecosystem, the back half of Nuremberg plays like gangbusters. Shannon, Crowe, and a magnificent Richard E. Grant as David Maxwell Fyfe go toe-to-toe and Vanderbilt’s chops get a chance to shine. His writing never indulges in simple pitter-patter Aaron Sorkin leftovers and his direction never stoops to basic coverage. Vanderbilt smartly opts for true meat and potatoes stylings delivered in between truly effective and wrenching displays of archive footage of the concentration camps post-liberation.

In this solemnity, Vanderbilt walks a tightrope as he infuses the highly explosive courtroom drama with stark exhibits of the true evils these men were tried of committing. It’s a testament to Vanderbilt’s tact that these moments land with a real devastation as he urges his audience, no matter how broadly, to witness the horrors wrought upon a generation and never let it happen again. Perhaps the film lands with a heavier blow than its craft earns because every audience member ought to be cognizant that history is repeating itself beyond the walls of their theater in Palestine, Myanmar, Sudan and the Congo. 

Sony Pictures Classics picked up distribution for Nuremberg after it was produced somewhat independently, or at least without immediate distribution. On its own, this is a no-brainer, because this tony drama is the most Sony Pictures Classics movie one could imagine. But they also picked up worldwide airline rights. In this regard, Sony Pictures Classics may have inked the most profitable deal of the year. Nuremberg is tailormade to be watched by grandparents on airplanes stumbling off half an Ambien and two sugar-free ginger ales.

However, this isn’t to say there’s no real staying power to the film. Vanderbilt’s Gen X liberal musings are bluntly channeled throughout the film, nowhere more so than in a closing quote that urges its audience to recognize cycles of history so as not to repeat them. Rivers to seas, one hopes that warning is heeded. Yet, this simple retelling of a pivotal point in global history is still just that.

Nuremberg is in theaters now.

-August