Russell Crowe towers as Hermann Göering in a mesmerizing performance as the Nazi Reichsmarschall. Ably directed and written by James Vanderbilt and based on the book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, the film is set at the end of WWII, whereby 22 Nazi leaders are being held for trial at Nuremberg.
What’s your perspective? Was this a show trial — filmed, narrated and broadcast by the Americans to the world, costing the respective taxpayers millions? Could it ever have been unbiased when every judge came from one of the victorious Allied nations? Wherever you stand, the 1946 proceedings championed an ideal, a new precedent — that leaders could be called to account for war crimes.
But here’s the subtext: the Allies hardly came to the table with clean hands. Stalin, with his brutal purges and mass deportations of his own people. The United States and their atomic annihilation. Britain, who had levelled whole cities — Dresden among them. These contradictions give Nuremberg both its power, hypocrisy and tension.
Rami Malek plays real-life psychiatrist Douglas Kelly, who was hired to ascertain the prisoners’ mental capacities. As a character, he’s an unlikeable weasel, openly admitting to exploiting his situation to write a book, aside from breaking patient–doctor trust/confidentiality to aid the Allied prosecution. (Which is cheating, isn’t it?) Malek is badly miscast; he doesn’t have the charisma required to counterbalance Crowe. Most of the time he’s awkwardly squinting upwards, sucking on his teeth like a Pekingese eating lemons.
In another prize bit of miscasting, young actor Leo Woodall plays a US sergeant–interpreter who translates for the Nazi prisoners. We find out his whole German–Jewish backstory via such clumsy exposition that it just doesn’t gel. It’s weak. A different actor, with different delivery, might have carried it off.
In fact, the whole “Team America” come off like characters in a farce — was that the intention? Richard E. Grant, as a tippling British prosecutor, has all the legal gravitas of a waiter reading a cocktail-party menu.
A salute to the production designers, art directors and costume design dept’ as complete standouts; they did an impeccable job of recreating the scenes of Nuremberg.
What is confronting are the archive newsreels of concentration-camp victims at Liberation, which — as at Nuremberg — are played to the courtroom and to us, the cinema audience. Such inhumanity is almost impossible to grasp…
One doesn’t want — given our knowledge of WWII — to like Göering, but as represented, one can’t help but be drawn in. He is a fascinating character who, even to the end, remains loyal to his Führer. But actually it is Crowe who transcends… the actor turns in a nuanced, powerhouse performance that is truly magnetic. For this reason, I’d recommend this film — and for its final message: “The only clue to what man can do is what man has done.”
My rating:   And the Oscar goes to….Russel Crowe