A warped history of justice, Tarantino-style
A new movie about the 1945 Nuremberg trials that prosecuted the remaining leaders of the Third Reich for war crimes barely makes sense today, given the current confusion over lawfare and political ethics. Nuremberg revisits this history as if to find a template for the hysteria behind today’s lawfare. Nuremberg simplifies the rise of Nazism, reducing it to interplay between Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, Germany’s highest-ranking military officer (played by Russell Crowe), and the American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) enlisted by the U.S. Army to analyze Göring before the trial.
Writer-director James Vanderbilt portrays how Göring’s “inflated sense of self” and personal charm complicated the men’s closeness — their “friendship” — despite wartime differences. Kelley accepts Göring’s smiley overtures without insisting on a strict doctor-subject relationship. This poor conceit is the product of our contemporary political distrust and inherent moral betrayal (i.e., American guilt).
Vanderbilt’s tale (based on “accounts of those who lived through it and those who didn’t”) begins and ends with the image of a soldier urinating on the emblem of a swastika, a trite metaphor of political disdain, similar to the puerile “punch a Nazi” fad and the frivolous accusations of Nazism in partisan rhetoric that merely aggravate social anxiety. It’s no less plausible than Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.
The Nuremberg trial’s significance is trivialized through several suspiciously contemporary phrases: “There’s no legal precedent for a trial,” and “What if we just give [the Nazis] a platform for spreading antisemitism all over the world?” Those concerns arise during behind-the-scenes intrigue in which Kelley clashes with career-minded prosecutor Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) and the Army commander of the Nuremberg prison, Burton Andrus (John Slattery). Each claims concern for “due process” — echoing a very current debate.
For viewers who no longer trust that our institutions represent justice, Vanderbilt’s straw-man arguments for a legitimate tribunal cast doubt on American involvement. “We’re going to figure these guys out,” Kelley brags to Army translator Howie Triest (Leo Woodall). “What if we could dissect evil?” Kelley gloats. But the conception of evil touted by Vanderbilt’s pundit is superficial. Nuremberg pretends to examine history in the disingenuous manner of a generation that has learned nothing from it.
Vanderbilt, who previously wrote Scream, Zodiac, and The Amazing Spider-Man, takes a facetious approach to the past. Black-and-white wartime footage of Nuremberg is viewed through an airplane window, newsreel clips of the actual trial are intercut with the dramatic scenes — a mix of real and fake, genuine and hypothetical. His coup de grâce is five minutes of actual concentration-camp film, ending with the savagery of Bergen-Belsen. Yet these horrifying images provoke a defendant’s skepticism: “Anyone can fake an atrocity.” That disbelief is the bane of contemporary politics, thus the film’s ultimate failure.
Crowe portrays Göring ironically, with a Santa Claus belly and smile (but never so rich as a humane Brando villain). Malek’s Kelley is susceptible, befriending Göring’s wife and daughter and then suspecting that he’s employed merely as a spy. This ambivalence is as much a sign of Vanderbilt’s perplexity as it is proof that he’s in too deep. The mix of sentimentality and skepticism — cherubic Triest’s personal confession and Kelley’s professional discomposure — defeats the movie.
Göring outfoxes American prosecutor Jackson, but British counsel David Maxwell Fyfe (Richard E. Grant, splendid) aces the conviction. The initial conceit that Kelley’s psychoanalysis would divine ultimate truth and perform some kind of judicial magic proves inept. To look back at the trial this way (Kelley’s confidence betrayed by a female journalist and Kelley later humiliating himself on a postwar radio program) is congruent with Millennial confusion about trust, righteousness, and legality.
Nuremberg offers two conclusions, each oddly anachronistic: First, Jackson opines that “all men are answerable to the law.” Then Kelley grumbles, “There are people like the Nazis in every country in the world today. Yes, in America!”
So Vanderbilt’s real motive is to question modern jurisprudence and resurrect the specter of fascism — although he never considers modern leftist parallels to National Socialism or criticizes the media’s complicity in political maneuvers that circumvent the law. Presenting the Nuremberg trials as the ultimate ethical test in politics distracts from the dehumanizing perfidies of the past four dark years in which biased politicians and journalists showed themselves incapable of sound judgment.
By contrast, Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) was a timely response to the then-recent revelations of the Eichmann trial. Kramer and screenwriter Abby Mann fictionalized the postwar moral challenge. And the cast of genuine movie stars — playing roles not historical figures — gave spiritual testimony without getting tied up in the kind of ego contest that Vanderbilt fixates on. The result was beautiful and emotionally persuasive, whereas Vanderbilt proves that morality is no longer possible in Hollywood.