Nuremberg
Director: James Vanderbilt
Cert: 15A
Genre: Historical Drama
Starring: Russell Crowe, Rami Malek, Leo Woodall, John Slattery, Mark O’Brien, Colin Hanks, Wrenn Schmidt, Lydia Peckham, Richard E Grant, Michael Shannon
Running Time: 2 hrs 29 mins
In Nuremberg, James Vanderbilt turns one of history’s most documented trials into a nervy psychological two-step. Working from Jack El-Hai’s book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, the screenwriter behind Zodiac and Scream finds focus in holding cells where Rami Malek’s Douglas Kelley, a young American psychiatrist, works with the unrepentant remnants of the Third Reich.
It’s an impossible duty: Rudolf Hess (Andreas Pietschmann) claims to have lost his memory entirely. Tasked with assessing the sanity of Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe at his most imposing) before trial, Kelley finds himself in an uneasy battle of wits. Concentration camps? Göring blames Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich.
Kelley’s patient is cunning, pompous, obdurate and, worst of all, charming. Imagine Judgment at Nuremberg refracted through Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter’s relationship in The Silence of the Lambs.
The psychiatrist becomes both interrogator and admirer, a manipulated messenger who delivers letters to and from Göring’s family. His military advisers quickly become suspicious. Crowe, who walks a theatrical line between repulsive and magnetic, gives his best performance for years.
An exceptional ensemble cast bolsters the Oscar-winner. Michael Shannon lends gravitas and circumspection as the US supreme court justice Robert H Jackson, leading the prosecution’s effort to create an international legal precedent. Richard E Grant effortlessly steals scenes as the British prosecutor David Maxwell Fyfe. Leo Woodall, playing the Jewish translator Howie Triest, lands the film’s most effective emotional punch.
The old-school courtroom sequences, cooly lit by the cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, are sleek and tense. When the polished dialogue and meticulous staging make way for real archive footage from the camps, it’s as wrenching as it ought to be.
And, for all the Hollywood gloss, Vanderbilt sounds an alarming relevance in Göring’s sneering claim that Hitler “made us feel German again” and Triest’s warning that “it happened because people let it happen”.
In cinemas from Friday, November 14th, with previews on Tuesday, November 11th