Historical drama a trial

Looking at the lead-up to the first Nuremberg trials in 1945, this misguided historical drama wastes its intriguing and important source material and squanders some very good actors with a script that feels tonally off.

Writer-director James Vanderbilt has written for the Spider-Man, Independence Day and Scream franchises, as well as making his directorial debut with the serious real-life news drama Truth.

Working here from Jack El-Hai’s book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, he’s clearly aiming to balance prestige and popular appeal, trying for a smooth, handsome, Oscar-worthy blend of information and entertainment.

Unfortunately, Nuremberg alternates between over-obvious exposition and oddly glib character beats, without ever conveying the enormity of its historical moment.

When the Allied nations decide to charge high-ranking Nazis for crimes against humanity rather than summarily executing them, there is concern the trials risk platforming the Nazis rather than indicting them. The film follows the work of two men as they prepare for this unprecedented event.

On the medical side, Dr. Douglas Kelley (Bohemian Rhapsody’s Rami Malek) is a psychiatrist for the American military who has been brought in to keep a suicide watch over the prisoners and assess whether they are competent to stand trial.

On the legal side, we have the reliably good Michael Shannon (The Shape of Water) as U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, who takes on what is widely seen in Washington as an unpopular gambit, a potential legal limbo using untested international law.

Much of the film’s focus is on Kelley and his encounters with Hermann Goering (Russell Crowe), the second most powerful leader in Germany for much of Hitler’s regime. Each man has his own agenda. Kelley, desperate to make his professional mark (and maybe some money), is hoping to write a book. Goering wants to use the trial to defend the Nazi project to the watching world, while denying knowledge of the death camps, a strategy he’s trying out on Kelley.

Malek is always interesting to watch but he feels miscast here, his nervy energy unable to act as a counterweight to Goering’s monstrous, malignant charm. Crowe, often wearing versions of Goering’s theatrical, self-designed uniforms, takes up all the air in the room with a sly display of overweening vanity and limitless contempt.

In a better film, this would have been a brilliant performance. As it is, Crowe’s work is compelling but incomplete.

Kelley will eventually come to the conclusion later reached by Hannah Arendt at the trial of Adolf Eichmann — that rather than being pathological, many Nazi officials were “terribly and terrifyingly normal.”

The film goes beyond showing Goering as a human who committed human acts of evil, however. For much of the film’s runtime, Kelley is enthralled by the man, with their sessions coming off as weirdly cosy rather than tense. And instead of standing outside and observing Kelley’s fatal fascination, the film itself gives in at some key points.

Meanwhile, with help from his British counterpart, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe (Richard E. Grant of Saltburn), Jackson is struggling to formulate a legal strategy. We’re not given much detail, though. Vanderbilt never manages to meaningfully connect Kelley’s and Jackson’s narratives as we move toward the opening day of trial, and the film’s overall structure feels patchy and distracted.

The approach to the period setting is also wobbly, with some dialogue that comes off as way too contemporary and other scenes that seem less like actual 1940s history and more like old 1940s movies. (Take a tossed-off subplot involving a hard-boiled dame who shows up on Kelley’s train and then keeps showing up, without the audience learning anything about her.)

Vanderbilt’s best work is probably his screenplay for David Fincher’s Zodiac, a masterwork of unease in the face of uncertainty. Here, staring into this difficult and complex history, he resorts to Hollywood flourishes and big reveals that feel out-of-place and pat.

Nuremberg is not outright awful, but it’s not nearly as serious or thoughtful as it thinks it is. It’s the most frustrating kind of mediocre movie, one that is haunted by a sense it could have been — and should have been — much, much better.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca