★★½ (2½ out of 4)
What to do when a great actor is stuck a not-so-great movie? You bite the bullet and watch anyway if the actor in question is Russell Crowe. And he’s at his cunning, commanding best as Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, a Nazi whose soft-pedaled narcissism gives him gobs of unearned confidence. Enough to fool the international tribunal at Nuremberg where he’ll stand trial for war crimes with 21 other Nazis in the high command? That’s the idea.
Ideas are otherwise in short supply in “Nuremberg,” now in theaters where writer-director James Vanderbilt hopes to fool audiences into thinking this gloss job over the facts actually has something to say. There was more complexity in 1961’s “Judgement at Nuremberg, an all-star, awards-bait, concentration camp drama in which defense attorney (Oscar winner Maximilian Schell) argued that German guilt must be shared with Hitler supporters worldwide, including the Soviet Union, the Vatican, Winston Churchill and American industrialists.
In this film, the obvious answer is always the right one.
The new “Nuremberg” finds it easier to focus on whether an Army psychiatrist, U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Kelley (a sometimes comically intense Rami Malek), can trip up Göring while deciding if he’s fit to stand trial. Of course he can take the stand or there’d be no movie. And there’s not much of one anyway as the script underlines everything obvious in Jack El-Hai’s 2013 novel “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist.”
Still, Crowe keeps us riveted, with Göring speaking German until Kelley suckers him into conversing in English, which the sly old fox does beautifully. He also never drops his air of privilege. Even while surrendering to the Allies, Hitler’s best buddy asks for someone to carry his luggage. That someone will is a foregone conclusion.
Kelley seems besotted, transferring messages from the good-humored monster to his wife Emmy (Lotte Verbeek) and their daughter. Is Kelley really falling for Göring’s charm act? Or is he using their bogus friendship to get material for a probable bestseller? In this film, the obvious answer is always the right one.
The film is here for the trials, dreamed up by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, played by Michael Shannon with a restraint few others in this cast attempt to adopt. One exception is Leo Woodall (a baddie in the conspiracy to kill Jennifer Coolidge in “The White Lotus” Season 2) as a secretive American soldier assigned to the case who casts a wary eye on the suspicious doings between Kelley and Göring.
The tensions come to a boil when Göring stops with the soft sell and shows Kelley why he’s not to be trifled with. It seems clear that Oscar winners Crowe (“Gladiator”) and Malek (“Bohemian Rhapsody”) signed on to this film to enact this clash of wills. And both deliver the fireworks.
Still, this is Crowe’s game all the way. It’s Göring’s hubris—his loyalty to his now dead Fuhrer—that trips him up. That and the decision in court to show documentary footage from the camps of horrific Nazi crimes against their Jewish captives. Those present in the court are stunned. And those watching this movie will be as well.
The tragic fact is we need to see and resee this heinous evidence, not just to school stupid Holocaust deniers but to remind us of the genocide that followed and still follows in its wake.
We can argue the morality of attaching this harrowing historical record to a frivolous melodrama that calls itself “Nuremberg” when the hokey book title, “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist,” far better expresses its openly greedy box-office motives. One undeniable truth remains: attention must be paid.