“We are able to do away with domestic tyranny only when we make all men answerable to the law, so that it can never happen again.” A noble quote from a noble man, Justice Robert H Jackson, as played by Michael Shannon in James Vanderbilt’s new World War II legal drama, Nuremberg. The trials, held in the aftermath of the war, put the leaders of the Third Reich on trial for all to see. While it’s a historical moment now, it was a dangerous gamble then. On the one hand, it gave the world an opportunity to see these Nazis for who and what they were, and on the other, it potentially gave them a platform from which to espouse their views.
Those men involved in the prosecution were walking a knife’s edge, and they knew it. Nuremberg attempts to dramatize how easily one can fall in with charismatic, evil men. The core relationship in the film is between Dr. Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), the psychiatrist charged with assessing the competency of these men for trial, and Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), the charismatic, narcissistic, and utterly manipulative second in command of the Nazi regime.
The film unfolds primarily in two parts: the first half is dedicated to conversations between Kelley and Göring, and the second to the actual trial. The film works best in the first half, with Malek nearly perfectly cast as the naive yet confident Kelley, and Crowe reminding us that he is the man for the job when you need a charismatic yet unlikable character. Their exchanges are electric, laced with layers of meaning and depth as each man tries to outwit the other.
The film suffers in the back half, though, where the focus is divided between this relationship and the trial. Crowe continues to shine—his appearance on the stand is a real highlight—but the film starts jumping around too much to cohere and devolves into a series of courtroom greatest hits. You will spend much of the trial waiting for the A Few Good Men moment that Vanderbilt’s script and direction very obviously telegraph, for example. The most recognizable trope is that of Kelley being extremely confident but ultimately falling under Göring’s spell, an internal conflict that is apparent before you even sit down in the cinema, playing out exactly as you expect it will. None of this is necessarily bad—it just hews a little too close to the established formula to be great.
Link: https://thatshelf.com/nuremberg-review-well-acted-drama-misses-opportunity-to-be-more/
Nuremberg Review: Well-Acted Drama Misses Opportunity to Be More | That Shelf
