A review of the important new film “Nuremberg”
Nuremberg: the German city where Hitler held his infamous rallies from 1923 to 1938 and where 22 Nazi leaders were put on trial in 1946-1947. This film centres on the interactions between two men at that trial: Hermann Göring, effectively Hitler’s deputy, and Dr Douglas Kelley, a US army psychiatrist assigned to determine the mental state of the Nazi defendants. The psychological interplay between these two characters is reminiscent of that between Hannibal Lector and Clarice Starling in “The Silence Of The Lambs”, except that the conversations between Göring and Kelley actually happened and were the subject of a book by Kelly. Chillingly, both Göring and Kelley ultimately met the same end.
Göring is portrayed by Russell Crowe in a performance a million miles from “Gladiator” and he has clearly put on a lot of weight which fits him well for this role which he fills with aplomb. Kelly is played by Rami Malek as the moral opposite to his earlier appearance as a Bond villain in “No Time To Die”. in a starry case, there is also Leo Woodall, John Slattery and Richard E Grant.
Shot in Hungary, this is a work with high production values and the use of some actual footage from the liberation of concentration camps and scenes from the trial add to the impact of the work. In the first two-thirds of the narrative, much of the dialogue is expository and often a little melodramatic, but one has to forgive this in a work which attempts to inform and entertain and is, after all, a film and not a documentary. The final third of the film is compelling and much of the wording of Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) is verbatim from the actual record of the trial.
The writer and director of this two and a half hour Sky Original product is James Vanderbilt. The messaging of the movie is not subtle but it is hugely important: that the Holocaust is a historical fact that must not be forgotten or forgiven and that Nazi Germany was not uniquely evil but a phenomenon that could happen in other times and other places. “The Zone Of Interest” made the same points more obliquely, but these uncomfortable messages need to be repeated loudly and clearly at a time of growing tendencies to totalitarianism.