Russell Crowe is chilling in ‘Nuremberg,’ a flawed but essential film

It’s the day before the Nazis will officially surrender in May of 1945, and while refugees trudge along an Austrian dirt road, a chauffeured limousine bearing a swastika rolls to a stop ahead. Allied soldiers point their weapons; the limo’s passenger makes a white flag from his wife’s torn slip and then emerges, spit shined and self-aggrandizing. It’s Hermann Göring, Hitler’s righthand man, and he would like help with his luggage.

So begins “Nuremberg,” James Vanderbilt’s imposing but uneven drama about the bureaucratic way that a post-World War II globe tried to make sense of what it had just been through. After his surrender, Göring (Russell Crowe) is marshaled to a palatial courthouse to await trial in what amounts to an experiment of international justice: Attorneys from four Allied countries will try him and 23 compatriots for war atrocities. In turn, Göring’s handler, the military psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), will try to make sure none of these high-ranking men choose a coward’s suicide before judges can condemn them to a criminal’s hanging.

“Tell me about him,” Kelley asks his translator as they head to meet their most famous charge. In one of many occasions in which the dialogue is unfortunately brought to you by Wikipedia, the translator (Leo Woodall) replies: “Hermann Göring. President of the Reichstag, minister of aviation, commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, a founding member of the Gestapo secret police, minister of economics, was appointed Hitler’s successor in 1939, and was the highest-ranking officer of all time.”

If you’ve read anything about this movie, it probably focused on Crowe’s coy, chilling, Oscar-courting performance, for which he learned German well enough to spend much of the film speaking it. Knowing none myself, I asked a German friend to watch with me and give feedback. “He’s definitely not bad at all,” my friend said, surprised. “You can tell he went through the effort. But you do immediately notice that he’s not a native speaker.”

My friend then confessed that, had I not dragged him to “Nuremberg,” he would have had no interest in watching. He’d grown up in a country constantly wrestling with its past; it was strange to watch Americans wrestle with his past, with accents: “It’s like — would you be interested in an Italian biopic on Abraham Lincoln?” (Hmmm.) He noted that we can’t seem to leave the era alone (guilty; I have written four historical fiction novels set in World War II). He wondered whether we like the era so much because it was a time in which Americans were inarguably the good guys.

“Schindler’s List” set our gold standard 32 years ago. “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” (2008) was maudlin and gross. The film I’ve returned to again and again is “Conspiracy,” a quiet 2001 made-for-TV production starring Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci. It’s based on the transcript of a real meeting in which high-level Nazis brainstormed — efficiently, dispassionately — their final solution. The clinical approach drives home the important point that 6 million Jews were murdered not in frenzied bloodlust, but in government-sanctioned extermination.

“Nuremberg” tries to show that punishment was also government-sanctioned and planful. The easy thing to do would have been to arrange these men against a wall for execution. The harder thing was to wrestle with what makes war actions immoral when war is intrinsically murderous, then to figure out who, exactly, was responsible. Malek plays Kelley as a slick profiteer. He figures that if he spends enough time flashing these bad guys Rorschach cards, he’ll have the makings of a bestseller — 0ne that explains how Germans came to be uniquely evil.

But as the Kelley/Göring game of cat-and-mouse continues, set mostly in gray prison cells, it’s not a spoiler alert to reveal that Kelley finds himself repeatedly surprised by the Nazi sitting across from him. It’s also not a spoiler to reveal that nothing about Kelley’s research — which in real life was published as a book called “22 Cells in Nuremberg” — found that Germans were uniquely evil. Brainwashed, maybe. But mostly they were, as a different controversial book deemed them, “Hitler’s willing executioners.” They were “ordinary men” living in “an extraordinary political culture.”

Now we’re getting a fuller picture of why, as my friend pointed out, Americans can’t quit fictionalizing World War II. Some of us — the “Saving Private Ryan” crowd, let’s call them — might like the moral clarity of America being the good guys. But others — the “Conspiracy” crew — are compelled and terrified by depictions of how easily robust democracies can become willing dictatorships, anywhere in the world.

At one point, Kelley demands to know what Göring even saw in Hitler, who was, after all, a failed painter and middling soldier. Göring gets a far-off look in his eyes and says, “He made us feel German again … like we could reclaim our former glory.”

Maybe you have been to those political rallies, too.

What makes a meaningful movie about the Holocaust? Its reflection of modern moments and events? Its moral clarity — good guys and bad? Its emotional weight? Mulling “Nuremberg,” I wondered whether it was even possible to measure a film about genocide under the same standards as a different kind of movie. Calling a plot “boring,” for example, would seem to buy into a misapprehension that we expect suffering to entertain us. And when the topic is horrific crimes against humanity, I generally could not give a flying monkey about the lighting design.

But, to do my best: “Nuremberg” isn’t as impactful as you want it to be. Crowe, yes, and there are some great supporting performances from Michael Shannon and Richard E. Grant as a U.S. Supreme Court justice and a British attorney. The expansive set and cinematography move effectively between grand and claustrophobic. But the pacing is uncalibrated, the scope too scattered, the emotions unearned. Vanderbilt’s adaptation of Jack El-Hai’s 2013 book, “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist,” is sometimes so ham-handed that you forget the man also wrote 2007’s excellent, unexpected “Zodiac.” This movie would have done better two-thirds as long but focused more tightly, or four times longer and airing on Netflix as a limited series.

Still: The human and the historian in me feels compelled to recommend it. Because movies about atrocities are necessary.

There is a point in “Nuremberg” where characters come to that realization themselves. In the middle of the trial, attorneys secure permission to play documentaries of camp liberation, and Vanderbilt uses real archival footage. In camp after camp, we see bodies piled and shoved with bulldozers until their limbs bend or break. A closeup lingers on one corpse’s face until the eyes slowly blink — this man is still, impossibly, alive.

There’s no plot, production value or any kind of story arc to the factual footage seen in that fictional courtroom. But, my God, we should all see this movie. Show it again and again.

PG-13. At area theaters. Contains violent content involving the Holocaust, strong disturbing images, suicide, language, smoking and drugs. In English and German. 148 minutes.