NEW YORK — He emerges from the back of a chauffeured car, shot from below, his enormous belly nearly busting open his uniform. And as an American GI on screen gasps, “It’s Hermann Goering!” you may follow suit, firing back, “And that’s Russell Crowe?”
Yes, the New Zealand-born Oscar-winning performer of such round-the-globe adventure hits as “Gladiator” and “Master and Commander” has taken it upon himself to act his brains out as the German military and political leader who, following Hitler’s suicide, was the face of the Nazi Party at the end of World War II.
“Nuremberg” is a courtroom drama detailing how the Allied Forces charged Goering and others with crimes against humanity (among other things), the first such trial in history. Although audiences already saw this done with the sweeping, all-star 1961 epic “Judgement at Nuremberg,” the 2025 version strives to take a more realistic approach to the story.
The angle — which is drawn from history — is to show the film through the eyes of army psychiatrist Douglas Kelly, played by another Oscar-winner, Rami Malek. Kelley was tasked with keeping a watch on the prisoners at Nuremberg (not just Goering, but Rudolf Hess and Julius Streicher and more) to make sure they were fit to stand trial, did not commit suicide, and, it is revealed in the film, share some inside intel with the prosecutors.
Once Kelley realizes what his assignment is, he starts licking his chops about the book he’ll inevitably publish on having such a close view of the Third Reich during its final days, but what he didn’t count on was forming something in the neighborhood of a friendship with Goering. As Kelley works to gain Goering’s trust, he learns about his childhood, meets his wife and daughter, and does what some understandably say one must never do when faced with a Nazi: He realizes this is a human being.
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“Nuremberg” is not by any stretch a pro-Nazi film. Its central sequence, as with “Judgement at Nuremberg,” is showing real revolting footage of corpses and near-corpses at liberated concentration camps. The American prosecutor, Justice Robert Jackson (played by Michael Shannon, the greatest Hollywood oddball since Christopher Walken), isn’t quite the physical manifestation of righteousness that Spencer Tracy was in the equivalent role from the 1961 film, but he is a driven man, focused on exposing the inhumanity of the Nazi regime, and doesn’t mind if doing so will set back his long term political goals. Indeed, if there was one aspect to the film I didn’t know about at first, it was how unpopular the idea of the trials was to begin with. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just shoot them?” many wonder — and it likely would, which is why it was so important to take the more laborious route.
Watch Jordan Hoffman discuss ‘Nuremberg’ here:
Written and directed by James Vanderbilt, screenwriter of the spectacular crime mystery “Zodiac” (but also the far-from-fantastic “Amazing Spider-Man 2” and some of the recent “Scream” pictures), “Nuremberg” lends itself to the type of scenes in which characters belch out dialogue that could easily double for a simplistic political debate. (I would be surprised if the real Hermann Goering ever pulled a “what about” argument with an American, suggesting that Hiroshima was just as bad as Auschwitz.) These moments can be simplistic, but they are still intriguing and touch upon what can rightly be called “important themes.”
But be honest: How enticing do “important themes” make for a night at the movies? “Nuremberg” does its best to dazzle things up with its side characters. John Slattery of “Mad Men” fame adds some crackle as Col. Burton C. Andrus, the commanding officer of the prison, Wrenn Schmidt of “For All Mankind” has the thankless role of a female soundboard for Justice Jackson, and the always welcome Richard E. Grant is the brandy-swilling British prosecutor David Maxwell Fyfe.
A still from the 2025 film ‘Nuremberg.’ (Courtesy)
Additionally, there’s Sgt. Howie Triest, a young American translator who is, like Kelley, stuck chatting with the imprisoned Nazis for weeks on end, but is also a Jew whose parents were killed at the camps. He intends to reveal his identity to his charges moments before they swing from the gallows, making for one of the more dramatic and meaningful story contours in the film.
But it all, sadly, is a little phony. Try as the movie might, the characters rarely feel like human beings, but instead come across as poseable essays. The concept of “the banality of evil” is not quite so new as it once was, so the central premise — showing how even a monster like Hermann Goering can care about his daughter — isn’t all that revelatory. Unfortunately, the scenes between Crowe and Malek are merely good. They don’t leap off the screen with the dynamism seen between Jodie Foster and Anthony Perkins when those two sparred in a prison cell in “The Silence of the Lambs.” That’s the benefit of fiction, I suppose.
In this photo from March 27, 1946, Nazi German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, right, leans in front of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, to confer with his lawyer, lower left, while Hermann Goering, center, chief of the German air force and one of Hitler’s closest aides, turns to talks with Karl Doenitz, rear right, during the Nueremberg war crime trial session. (AP Photo, File)
“Nuremberg” is an admirable movie for adults at a time when it is more than necessary to remind people what can happen when a society embraces antisemitism. There are certainly films on this topic that are far worse. But for something that may seem packaged to be a surefire Oscar-winner, the judgment is a little mixed.
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