<\/p>\n
It\u2019s 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\u2019s passenger makes a white flag from his wife\u2019s torn slip and then emerges, spit shined and self-aggrandizing. It\u2019s Hermann G\u00f6ring, Hitler\u2019s righthand man, and he would like help with his luggage.<\/p>\n
So begins \u201cNuremberg,\u201d James Vanderbilt\u2019s 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, G\u00f6ring (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, G\u00f6ring\u2019s handler, the military psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), will try to make sure none of these high-ranking men choose a coward\u2019s suicide before judges can condemn them to a criminal\u2019s hanging.<\/p>\n
\u201cTell me about him,\u201d 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: \u201cHermann G\u00f6ring. 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\u2019s successor in 1939, and was the highest-ranking officer of all time.\u201d<\/p>\n
If you\u2019ve read anything about this movie, it probably focused on Crowe\u2019s 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. \u201cHe\u2019s definitely not bad at all,\u201d my friend said, surprised. \u201cYou can tell he went through the effort. But you do immediately notice that he\u2019s not a native speaker.\u201d<\/p>\n
My friend then confessed that, had I not dragged him to \u201cNuremberg,\u201d he would have had no interest in watching. He\u2019d grown up in a country constantly wrestling with its past; it was strange to watch Americans<\/i> wrestle with his past, with accents: \u201cIt\u2019s like \u2014 would you be interested in an Italian biopic on Abraham Lincoln?\u201d (Hmmm.) He noted that we can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cSchindler\u2019s List\u201d set our gold standard 32 years ago. \u201cThe Boy in the Striped Pajamas\u201d (2008) was maudlin and gross. The film I\u2019ve returned to again and again is \u201cConspiracy,\u201d a quiet 2001 made-for-TV production starring Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci. It\u2019s based on the transcript of a real meeting in which high-level Nazis brainstormed \u2014 efficiently, dispassionately \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cNuremberg\u201d 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\u2019ll have the makings of a bestseller \u2014 0ne that explains how Germans came to be uniquely evil.<\/p>\n
But as the Kelley\/G\u00f6ring game of cat-and-mouse continues, set mostly in gray prison cells, it\u2019s not a spoiler alert to reveal that Kelley finds himself repeatedly surprised by the Nazi sitting across from him. It\u2019s also not a spoiler to reveal that nothing about Kelley\u2019s research \u2014 which in real life was published as a book called \u201c22 Cells in Nuremberg\u201d \u2014 found that Germans were <\/i>uniquely evil. Brainwashed, maybe. But mostly they were, as a different controversial book deemed them, \u201cHitler\u2019s willing executioners.\u201d They were \u201cordinary men\u201d living in \u201can extraordinary political culture.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now we\u2019re getting a fuller picture of why, as my friend pointed out, Americans can\u2019t quit fictionalizing World War II. Some of us \u2014 the \u201cSaving Private Ryan\u201d crowd, let\u2019s call them \u2014 might like the moral clarity of America being the good guys. But others \u2014 the \u201cConspiracy\u201d crew \u2014 are compelled and terrified by depictions of how easily robust democracies can become willing dictatorships, anywhere in the world.<\/p>\n
At one point, Kelley demands to know what G\u00f6ring even saw in Hitler, who was, after all, a failed painter and middling soldier. G\u00f6ring gets a far-off look in his eyes and says, \u201cHe made us feel German again \u2026 like we could reclaim our former glory.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maybe you have been to those political rallies, too.<\/p>\n
What makes a meaningful movie about the Holocaust? Its reflection of modern moments and events? Its moral clarity \u2014 good guys and bad? Its emotional weight? Mulling \u201cNuremberg,\u201d 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 \u201cboring,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
But, to do my best: \u201cNuremberg\u201d isn\u2019t 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\u2019s adaptation of Jack El-Hai\u2019s 2013 book, \u201cThe Nazi and the Psychiatrist,\u201d is sometimes so ham-handed that you forget the man also wrote 2007\u2019s excellent, unexpected \u201cZodiac.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Still: The human and the historian in me feels compelled to recommend it. Because movies about atrocities are necessary.<\/p>\n
There is a point in \u201cNuremberg\u201d 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\u2019s face until the eyes slowly blink \u2014 this man is still, impossibly, alive.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
PG-13. <\/b>At area theaters. Contains violent content involving the Holocaust, strong disturbing images, suicide, language, smoking and drugs. In English and German. 148 minutes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s 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\u2019s passenger makes a white flag from his wife\u2019s torn slip and then emerges, spit shined […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2029532,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[406747,371290,365575,349100,368438,360209,339676,407910],"class_list":["post-2138967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-douglas-kelley","tag-hermann-goring","tag-james-vanderbilt","tag-kenneth-branagh","tag-leo-woodall","tag-rami-malek","tag-russell-crowe","tag-war-atrocities"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/In-Black-Rabbit-Jason-Bateman-and-Jude-Law-are-brothers.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2138967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2138967"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2138967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2138968,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2138967\/revisions\/2138968"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2029532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2138967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2138967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2138967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}