by Mark Demetrius
Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Russell Crowe, Rami Malek, Michael Shannon, Lydia Peckham, Leo Woodall, Colin Hanks, Richard E. Grant, John Slattery
Intro:
… worth seeing for the inherent fascination of its subject, and Russell Crowe’s performance.
This film — based on Jack el-Hai’s non-fiction book The Nazi and The Psychiatrist — begins with the capture of Hermann Goering, the second most powerful man in the Third Reich, and then deals largely with the lead-up to the Nuremberg war trial. (“The first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world”, as Supreme Court justice Robert H. Jackson — played by Michael Shannon — puts it.) It’s concerned with the true story of the meetings between U.S. army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) and Goering (Russell Crowe), in which Kelley attempts to understand, analyse and assess — and perhaps thereby incriminate — the notorious Nazi. Goering, for his part, uses a combination of intelligence, cunning and charm to try and dictate how he will be perceived.
Russell Crowe is excellent in the role, and incidentally speaks initially in German and then in English with a flawless German accent. Sometimes, there’s a danger that Goering’s indisputable charisma — coupled with the superficially light tone of some of the dialogue — will distract from our mindfulness of the gargantuan evil which the Nazis perpetrated. This is, however, well and truly prevented by a protracted sequence of actual and very graphic footage from the concentration camps.
The weakest link in the chain here is Rami Malek, whose portrayal of Kelley is so boyish — so much like an excited puppy — that its incongruity is jarring. But Nuremberg gets better (and darker) as it goes on. This is a movie in which the ending is powerful no matter how much you already knew about the actual history. And the ‘what happened to them later’ information before the closing credits is, to put it mildly, interesting.
Nuremberg is worth seeing, not for its overall quality but for two things: the inherent fascination of its subject, and Russell Crowe’s performance.
