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| TRAILER Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring |
James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg is a film that arrives dressed in the solemn vestments of historical gravity, an old-fashioned courtroom drama whose self-conscious stateliness seems both its armor and its limitation. Based on Jack El-Hai’s 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, the film returns to the shadowed corridors of postwar reckoning, where justice, psychology, and the residue of human monstrosity converge. It is, unmistakably, a film of weighty intentions — perhaps too aware of its own importance, too reverent of the solemn architecture of its subject — and yet there is a kind of subdued fascination in watching it strain against the very moral enormity it seeks to contain.
Rami Malek, with his sphinxlike features and alert, slightly haunted gaze, plays U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, the man tasked with assessing the mental fitness of captured Nazi leaders in preparation for the Nuremberg trials. What begins as a procedural inquiry — is Hermann Göring, the Reichsmarschall himself, sane enough to face judgment? — quickly becomes a metaphysical duel, or at least the idea of one. Opposite Malek, Russell Crowe’s Göring looms with the lethargic charisma of decaying power: his hair slicked back, his torso heavy and imperious, his voice low and untroubled, the very image of a man unrepentant and unbothered by history’s verdict. Crowe, now in full autumnal mode as an actor, turns Göring into a study in self-satisfied rot — a man who knows precisely what he’s done and yet clings to the narcotic delusion of innocence, his arrogance curdled into a kind of grotesque dignity.
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| Rami Malek as Douglas Kelley |
The film opens amid the rubble of a defeated Germany, a landscape that cinematographer Seamus McGarvey renders in mournful greys and sepia tones. Vanderbilt, who previously wrote Zodiac and The Amazing Spider-Man, directs with a craftsman’s restraint and a courtroom dramatist’s sense of space. Every composition seems designed to remind us that we are witnessing something important — the birth of modern justice, the confrontation between civilization and barbarism. Yet in its reverence for the moment, Nuremberg occasionally calcifies into pageantry. One can almost feel the ghost of Stanley Kramer hovering nearby, murmuring about moral responsibility. The film’s tone is resolutely 1958, its rhythms stately, its conscience clean.
Vanderbilt’s screenplay gestures toward psychology, but in practice, the encounters between Kelley and Göring often circle the same impasse. Kelley, bristling with intellectual curiosity, tries to locate a human logic beneath the Nazi’s monstrousness; Göring parries with vanity and rhetoric, a man performing his own myth. “You think I’m mad,” he tells Kelley, “but perhaps madness is simply believing one’s country can survive defeat.” It’s a line that might have resonated more deeply if the film were willing to interrogate the seductive rationalizations of power, rather than merely observing them from the safety of moral hindsight.
Malek, a meticulous and inward performer, finds something tremulous in Kelley’s fascination with his subject — the way a man of science can be drawn, almost erotically, to the abyss he’s meant to diagnose. Yet the screenplay flirts with this complexity without fully embracing it. The dynamic between Kelley and Göring is presented as a “battle of wits,” but the battle is largely verbal, the wits somewhat uneven. Göring’s evasions are repetitive, and Kelley’s probing, however intelligent, rarely penetrates the shell of narcissism that Crowe’s performance constructs so completely. What’s left is a psychological stalemate, a drama of intellects that never quite catches fire.
Still, there are moments when Nuremberg pierces its own formality. When actual footage from the concentration camps is introduced during the trial, Vanderbilt allows the archival horror to intrude without mediation — the film briefly becoming a window to reality rather than a recreation of it. The choice is jarring, even uncomfortable, precisely because it disrupts the sheen of the film’s prestige aesthetic. The juxtaposition between cinematic gloss and documentary atrocity forces the viewer to confront an unsettling truth: no dramatization, however earnest, can domesticate the extremity of what the Nazis did. The real footage feels like an intrusion from another moral dimension, reminding us that the evil Vanderbilt’s film circles so politely was once painfully, and perhaps is still now, obscenely real.
Around the central duel, a fine supporting cast orbits with varying shades of gravitas. Michael Shannon brings a weary righteousness to Robert H. Jackson, the Supreme Court justice leading the prosecution, his voice trembling with both conviction and frustration as he faces Göring’s slippery rhetoric. Richard E. Grant, all clipped diction and prosecutorial fury, delivers the film’s most cathartic moment when his British lawyer Maxwell-Fyfe finally corners Göring on the stand, demanding whether he would still swear loyalty to Hitler after seeing the evidence of genocide. Crowe’s curt, unrepentant “yes” lands like a confession of faith in evil itself. It is, arguably, the film’s most haunting beat.
Vanderbilt stages these courtroom exchanges with classical precision, his camera gliding with patience, his lighting burnished like old mahogany. But the meticulousness, while admirable, sometimes smothers the drama. For all its historical significance, Nuremberg often feels curiously airless — a film sealed inside its own sense of prestige, unwilling to risk the kind of formal or emotional disorder that might have made it vital. It’s as if Vanderbilt fears that too much cinematic passion would desecrate the sanctity of the subject. The result is a work that commands respect more than engagement, a film to admire rather than to feel.
And yet, despite its limitations, Nuremberg exerts a slow, insistent pull. Crowe’s Göring, in particular, lingers in the mind long after the credits roll — not as a monster of myth, but as something duller, more disturbing: a bureaucrat of vanity, insulated by privilege, whose self-belief is so absolute it becomes indistinguishable from madness. The film’s final scenes, showing him in his cell before his suicide by cyanide, are played with devastating understatement. Crowe’s eyes, half-lidded and serene, seem to regard his own death as just another performance. The psychiatrist, watching, is left with nothing but the hollow certainty that understanding evil is not the same as curing it.
At its Toronto premiere, Nuremberg reportedly received a four-minute standing ovation, and one can see why. It has all the hallmarks of prestige cinema: historical fidelity, solemn performances, moral purpose, and the faint odor of Oscar cologne. But beyond the awards-season trappings lies something more fragile — a genuine, if incomplete, attempt to grapple with the psychology of atrocity, to ask what happens when intellect encounters evil and finds it unanswerable.
Vanderbilt’s film does not discover anything new about Hermann Göring, nor does it truly map the dark corridors of his mind. But it reminds us, with a certain melancholy eloquence, that evil often hides behind the face of the civilized, the articulate, the charming. Nuremberg is a movie that wants to understand monsters, yet finds only mirrors. Its achievement lies not in revelation but in the quiet, unsettling recognition that some human mysteries resist diagnosis — that after all the trials, the interrogations, and the reckonings, we are still left staring into the abyss, waiting for it to blink.
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