{"id":270086,"date":"2025-11-08T13:58:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-08T13:58:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/270086\/"},"modified":"2025-11-08T13:58:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-08T13:58:07","slug":"russell-crowe-makes-for-a-menacing-nazi-in-nuremberg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/270086\/","title":{"rendered":"Russell Crowe Makes for a Menacing Nazi in \u2018Nuremberg\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Midway through Nuremberg, prosecutors play for their Nuremberg trial<\/a> attendees never-before-seen footage shot at various Nazi concentration camps, and James Vanderbilt\u2019s drama more or less pauses its fictionalized action to gaze in horror, like its characters, at this appalling documentary material. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s a sequence of overpowering ghastliness, definitively making the proceedings\u2019 case about the necessity of confronting the truth in order to achieve justice. It\u2019s also, unfortunately, a high point never matched by the rest of the film, which is undone by storytelling that, however well-intentioned, coats its real-life tale in a corny Hollywood sheen.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Sixty-four years after Stanley Kramer\u2019s Judgement at Nuremberg, Nuremberg (Nov. 7, in theaters) adapts Jack El-Hai\u2019s 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist to tell the tale of shrink Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek<\/a>), who\u2019s ordered by the military to Nuremberg to assess the last living members of the Nazi high command. <\/p>\n

Of those captives, the most illustrious (i.e., despicable) is Hermann G\u00f6ring (Russell Crowe<\/a>), whose pain pills are an immediate tip-off to Kelley that the Third Reich military and political leader\u2014the designated successor to Adolph Hitler\u2014is an opiate addict. This is merely another early sign of Kelley\u2019s cunning intellectual acumen, which has already been suggested by an introductory scene on a train in which he shows off, to a beautiful passenger (Lydia Peckham) who\u2019ll later be exposed as a journalist, a sleight-of-hand magic trick.<\/p>\n

\"RussellRussell Crowe on trial in \u201cNuremberg.\u201d Sony Pictures Classics <\/p>\n

Despite the misgivings of Colonel Burton C. Andrus (John Slattery<\/a>), Kelley is brought in to analyze the Allied Forces\u2019 valuable prisoners and, in doing so, to prevent them from committing suicide. <\/p>\n

With a big cocky smile tattooed on his face, Malek oozes confidence as the psychiatrist, who after a single meeting with G\u00f6ring deduces that the Nazi can speak English\u2014a revelation that wows Sergeant Howie Triest (Leo Woodall<\/a>), who serves as Kelley\u2019s translator\u2014and he almost immediately comes off as unflappably smug. In this regard, he\u2019s well-paired with G\u00f6ring, a heavyset villain who oozes arrogance like sweat, and whom Crowe embodies as a viper whose smiles and casual chitchat are a fa\u00e7ade designed to mask his lethality.<\/p>\n

Nuremberg is a cat-and-mouse contest between Kelley and G\u00f6ring, with the former eventually gaining the confidence of the latter\u2014or so he thinks\u2014by flattering his sense of superiority, tolerating his evasions and swallowing his excuses, and delivering letters to his wife (Lotte Verbeek) and daughter (Fleur Bremmer). <\/p>\n

That Kelley quickly befriends Mrs. G\u00f6ring and her child is a clear ethical no-no, and yet Vanderbilt doesn\u2019t care to complicate his protagonist. Instead, he saddles him with a formulaic character arc in which he grows close to G\u00f6ring, then realizes that this is a fool\u2019s game, and ultimately hits rock bottom before redeeming himself and figuratively saving the day. Never less than morally upstanding, he\u2019s a two-dimensional protagonist rendered one-note by Malek\u2019s creaky and unconvincing lead performance. <\/p>\n

\"RamiRami Malek Sony Pictures Classics <\/p>\n

Speaking of awkwardness, Nuremberg simultaneously concentrates on Supreme Court justice Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon<\/a>), who risks his shot at becoming Chief Justice by spearheading the effort to stage an unprecedented international trial to hold the Nazis\u2019 accountable for their sins. <\/p>\n

Shannon exudes noble conviction as the legal bigwig but his every moment is a case study in orating to the audience, none clunkier than when, at an impasse due to Congress\u2019 unwillingness to go along with his plan, he visits the Pope\u2014who in 1936 signed an accord with the Nazi empire\u2014and \u201cblackmails\u201d him into supporting the venture. That said, Vanderbilt shortchanges all his cast members by giving them similar soundbite-y parts, including Colin Hanks as psychiatrist Gustave Gilbert and Richard E. Grant as British prosecutor David Maxwell Fyfe.<\/p>\n

Nuremberg is constructed like an old-fashioned awards-bait period piece, complete with trailer-ready lines of dialogue that put a neat-and-tidy button on scenes. There\u2019s a mechanical quality to Vanderbilt\u2019s plotting that negates the unexpected and enlightening; throughout, he\u2019s content to relay familiar ideas about the nature of evil (and mankind\u2019s capacity for it), the mechanisms of the Third Reich, and the virtues of democratic processes. <\/p>\n

These notions are by and large true. However, the filmmaker expresses them bluntly, such that when Kelley learns that G\u00f6ring\u2019s wife and daughter have been arrested\u2014which upsets him to a dubious degree\u2014he tears into Andrus about America succumbing to the same ugliness as its enemies, announcing, \u201cWe\u2019re supposed to be better than this!\u201d<\/p>\n

\"RussellRussell Crowe as Hermann G\u00f6ring. Sony Pictures Classics <\/p>\n

Every second of Nuremberg is so writerly as to stick out like a sore thumb. At a bar, Peckham\u2019s reporter informs Kelley that due to the forthcoming trial, \u201cthis city\u2019s about to become the greatest show on Earth!\u201d <\/p>\n

In his spartan cell, G\u00f6ring butters up the doctor by asking to learn his magic trick, and he ultimately states that they\u2019re alike because Kelley\u2014who plans to make a mint penning a book about this experience\u2014wants to be important, revered, and remembered. On the cusp of potential crisis, Triest tearfully opens up about his secret past so Kelley won\u2019t quit on their mission. In these and other instances, it\u2019s not the sentiments themselves that grate; instead, it\u2019s their hokey and on-the-nose delivery.<\/p>\n

Stately and inert, Nuremberg is a cookie-cutter throwback that\u2019s hemmed in by convention. Vanderbilt plays things safe both in terms of form and content, and it\u2019s the latter that\u2019s ultimately most deflating about his feature directorial debut, whose conclusion is foregone and whose insights are minimal. <\/p>\n

\"MichaelMichael Shannon Sony Pictures Classics <\/p>\n

In a post-war coda, Kelley rails drunkenly on the radio about everyone\u2019s (including Americans\u2019) facility for fascistic atrocities\u2014an outburst designed, not so subtly, to speak to our present moment. Yet even then, the message proves frustratingly pat and cursory, just as a closing title card about Kelley\u2019s sad fate hints at pertinent issues that the preceding action barely touched upon.<\/p>\n

Crowe\u2019s imposing turn as G\u00f6ring, a uniformed beast whose loyalty to country and self is amoral in the extreme, keeps the film from wholly devolving into a collection of tired therapy- and legal-thriller clich\u00e9s. But especially in a 2025 rife with antisemitism and authoritarianism, its failure to say something new or complex\u2014about the Holocaust, its perpetrators, and the difficulty of facing hard realities\u2014makes it feel like a missed opportunity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Midway through Nuremberg, prosecutors play for their Nuremberg trial attendees never-before-seen footage shot at various Nazi concentration camps,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":270087,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[49,48,361,75,337,124022,46854],"class_list":{"0":"post-270086","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-nazi-party","14":"tag-russell-crowe"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270086"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270086\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/270087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}