NUREMBERG

MALEK LEADS INSIDE STORY OF WORLD WAR II NAZI WAR CRIMES TRIAL

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The desperate need to prevent future world wars leads to questionable behind the scenes methods in the war crimes trial of 22 captured German Nazi officers.

Director James Vanderbilt focusses the camera on the decision by the victorious Allied Forces to prosecute the Nazi regime for causing 70 million war dead in the hope of preventing a resurgence of the hate in Nuremberg (2025).

Rami Malek is cast as army psychiatrist, Douglas Kelly, who is assigned to counsel the prisoners, including the captured Nazi second in command, Herman Goring, played by Russell Crowe.

Kelly is portrayed as a genuinely earnest psychiatrist who is thrust into a career defining assignment of uncovering the human causes of evil while also keeping the prisoners from committing suicide before their trial.

Vanderbilt compresses time from the moment Goring is captured in Austria on May 8, 1945 to the reading of the verdicts on September 30, 1946. The director controls the narrative by dropping hints in the dialogue as to how much time has passed and by routine events that could be measured in time, such as the passing of letters between Goring and his wife and child.

And, the courthouse in Nuremberg has to be rebuilt from rubble, which takes time, about three months according to Goring.

Vanderbilt is also known for Truth (2015) costarring Robert Redford as CBS 60 Minutes anchor, Dan Rather, and Cate Blanchett, as CBS News producer Mary Mapes, who broadcast a story, based on questionable evidence, about United States President George W. Bush’s military record.

The film is mainly about the study of evil, but the script introduces the character of the psychiatrist as much as the character of the Nazi leader.

Douglas visits Goring on a daily basis, and thereby manages to establish a bond with the prisoner as a fellow human being – and as a result, Douglas takes it upon himself to visit Goring’s wife and daughter, who are in hiding in a nearby German town.

Malek shows how Douglas is mistaken about Goring’s human side, which only comes to light during the trial with film footage of the starving Jewish survivors and the piles of corpses of deceased Jewish prisoners in the 1200 concentration camps throughout Europe.

Crowe, as Goring, creates a character who may be oblivious to his own evil. Goring is show to initially having surrendered to the Allies with the untold hope of assisting in managing the restructuring of post-war Germany.

The Nuremberg trials were quite unexpected, with many Nazis not even having set plans to escape a collapsing war regime.

The narrative also takes the camera briefly inside the parts played in the trial by other characters, such as Michael Shannon playing the American prosecutor Robert H, Jackson, Richard E. Grant playing the British Prosecutor Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, and John Slattery as Colonel Burton C. Andrus.

And Leo Woodall has a substantial part as the American soldier providing German-English translations for the prisoners.

The story, though, proves too complicated even for the 2h 28m runtime. The editing results in a lot of short cuts that limit the actors in their character development. The trial for example, takes 218 days in real time, but the courtroom scenes are so limited that the dialogue lacks suspense.

Crowe, for example, could have accomplished a lot more in his character development with a bit more screen time in the courtroom, especially with all the historical footage of the trial available, although the real story of the film goes on in Goring’s prison cell.

Despite the involvement of a psychiatrist, a lot still goes on in the minds of the characters that ultimately is given only a superficial treatment.

This editing of what ought to be a longer runtime is unfortunate because the complicated true story is otherwise well constructed with good camera shots in appropriate set ambience. Schindler’s List (1993), for example, has a runtime of 3h 15m, but also the narrative focuses on fewer main characters, with most of the tension in the film occurring around the leading character, Oskar Schindler, played by Liam Neeson.

The linear narrative, for Nuremberg, is assembled well, but one cannot help but wonder what scenes have erroneously been edited out.