Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!
Every year, there’s an Oscar bait movie or two that fails to secure a single nomination. Sometimes, it’s a good to great film that is simply overlooked, like The Woman King from 2022 or The Iron Claw from the subsequent year. Sometimes, it’s a movie that has gone hilariously bad, like Cats from 2019. And then there are the movies that have big ambitions, but fail to gain any traction. By all rights, Nuremberg was created for a run at the Oscars, and it goose egged.
It had to have had a shot, though. It’s a movie that is clearly relevant, discussing the Nuremberg trials at the end of WWII, making clear comparisons to the rise of fascism in the U.S. today. It’s headlined by two Oscar winners (Russell Crowe and Rami Malek) and a two-time nominee (Michael Shannon) and a one-time nominee (Richard E. Grant). This was clearly a film that wanted to take a swing for the top prize, and probably a few others (Best Actor, Supporting Actor, and Adapted Screenplay for a start).
We’re going to start on the last day of the war and the capture of Herman Göring (a portly Russell Crowe). American Associate Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) is told of this event, and considers the idea of a tribunal to try the Nazis who have been captured. The U.S. is not on board with the idea, but Jackson convinces them by getting the agreement of Pope Pius XII (Giuseppe Cederna), whose relationship with Nazi Germany could be called “complicated” only by the most politic. In truth, Pius was the first world leader to recognize the Nazi regime and give it some legitimacy.
Around this same time, psychologist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) is brought in to question the 22 Nazi prisoners and evaluate their mental health. He has varying opinions of them, ultimately deciding that Göring is intelligent but narcissistic. Kelley plans on compiling his notes at the end of this and writing a book about what he discovered from the men in the cells.
Surprisingly, Nuremberg doesn’t spend a great deal of time on the actual trials. Instead, a great deal of the film deals with a few surrounding aspects of the trial. We deal with Kelley learning about the men who will be on trial, eventually being aided/undermined by Gustave Gilbert (Colin Hanks) when prisoner and head of the German Labor Front Robert Ley (Tom Keune) manages to kill himself. We’ll see Kelley establish a tentative relationship with Göring’s wife and daughter (Lotte Verbeek and Fleur Bremmer). We’ll see Jackson struggle with how he will prosecute the Nazis at the trial, eventually working with British barrister Sir David Maxwell Fyfe (Richard E. Grant) on strategy. Eventually Kelley is relieved of his duties when, in a drunken fury after discovering the arrest of Göring’s wife, he reveals everything he knows to a British journalist.
There’s a good movie somewhere inside Nuremberg. Actually, that’s unfair. This is a good movie in and of itself. There may be a great one in here, though, but it’s not this one. The problem, at least for me, is the focus. I don’t care at all about the relationship between Kelley and Emmy Göring. What I care about is the terrible crimes being not simply revealed, but accounted for and punishment carried out. I’m not a vengeful person, but some crimes need to be punished and the bad actors held up as an example. This is such a case.
Ultimately, the climax of the film comes when Jackson gets Göring on the stand and the two have a battle of wits. This whole segment, which should be the part of the film that leads us to exactly what Göring was like and what he did ends up feeling almost anticlimactic and unsatisfying. The message of the film seems to be that Nazis are certainly bad, but you have to trick them into saying so, because otherwise, people won’t really believe it. There’s an attempt to connect this to the present day—a connection that is clearly there—and Nuremberg feels ham-handed in this as well.
I really wanted to like this. Any film that is going to give us Nazis getting strung up should be one that has a line out the door. This, sadly, feels like it can’t get us there, instead giving us a Jewish-American soldier finding sympathy for the men who slaughtered his family. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Why to watch Nuremberg: Because these trials matter.
Why not to watch: Judgment at Nuremberg already exists.
No comments:
Post a Comment