RATING
Director(s): James Vanderbilt
Country: United States
Author: James Vanderbilt, Jack El-Hai
Actor(s): Michael Shannon, Colin Hanks, Russell Crowe
Written by Tom Augustine
They say that history is doomed to repeat itself, all too easy to forget, and yet in 2025 I still find it totally befuddling that World War II, and in particular the ideology and atrocities of the Nazi Party, could have enjoyed such an obscuring as to allow for their viewpoints to once again gain a foothold in the populace. That’s not to say there haven’t always been Nazis — less vocal, less present, certainly, but lurking and waiting for their moment of resurgence since their defeat in 1945. 2025, after years of slowly building to a boil, seems to be the moment they have chosen to press their advantage — in America, a Gestapo-like force terrorises the streets, ripping neighbours from their homes, while dictators rise and genocides unfold across the globe. Arguably, this return to prominence has come as a result of the failure of democratic and progressive institutions to combat them — in a society that rewards staying quiet, it is all too easy to look the other way, particularly if you get paid to do so. In cinema, particularly in Hollywood, creatives seem to be fighting a losing war against the tools of fascism — Trump supporters have bought up huge swaths of our entertainment organisations, retrograde, right wing-baiting Christian flicks climb the box office, and AI, the de facto tool of the fascist aesthetic, continues to attempt to wipe out the very humanity at the heart of art-making. Fascism is back, and it’s gaining power quickly.
James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg is a history lesson, then, and a seemingly invaluable one considering the decline of awareness of the Nazi Party’s atrocities and the parallel rise of disinformation on social media. It’s the kind of film seemingly designed for high school history classes — handsomely mounted, cookie-cutter, prosaic and yet effective in translating a major moment in history for newcomers. That it comes from Vanderbilt — yes, of those Vanderbilts — is both an amusing footnote and a good indicator of the level of progressivism you’re about to encounter. His other directorial effort, Truth, is a similarly rock-solid encapsulation of a real-life scandal, one that featured Robert Redford as Dan Rather and Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes re-enacting the controversy surrounding the reporting of former President George W Bush’s military service. Solidly progressive, if hardly radical (in both style and politics), is how I’d categorise Nuremberg — not necessarily a bad thing, considering the film goes to great lengths to both recount the events of the trial for those who aren’t history buffs, and actively parallel said events to current affairs. Vanderbilt is exceedingly efficient at excavating pivotal periods of American history — as the writer of Zodiac, particularly, he managed to evoke the movement of history through the obsession of his characters, a trick he tries here, also, to marginally less successful but generally satisfying ends.
A work of classy, if not groundbreaking execution, James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg is a largely effective retelling of the trial of Nazi leaders following the end of World War II. Populated by a sturdy cast of reliable performers, it is a film that digs just deep enough into some troubling questions to justify its more maudlin, prosaic stretches.
The film is based on Jack El-Hai’s non-fiction book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, focussing primarily on the relationship between US Army shrink Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) and Nazi Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), who is being assessed for his fitness to stand trial. US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) seeks to establish an International Military Tribunal, the first of its kind, to try Göring and other high commanders for crimes against humanity — a process which had never been attempted before. With general opinion being that Nazi commanders should, as per tradition, be simply shot, closing the door on World War II, Jackson is of the opinion that defeating the Nazis in a court of law will stopper their attempts to become martyrs for their cause — an opinion which proved true for a very long stretch of time. It is a high-risk, high pressure situation — with Hitler, Himmler and Göebbels dead, Göring is the last of the Nazi command. More than that, the revelation of the Holocaust is not yet widely known — a rumour, perhaps, but one that hasn’t been encountered by the vast majority of the populace. This includes Kelley, who encounters Göring initially as a dignified fallen soldier, one worthy of respect and the source of much fascination for the psychiatrist. Aiming to write a book about his encounters, Kelley finds himself forming something dangerously akin to a friendship with the amiable, silver-tongued Göring, who maintains total confidence that he will be victorious at trial.
Vanderbilt’s film assembles a muscular cast, with Crowe and Malek centre stage, but plenty of attention also paid to Shannon’s and his British counterpart Sir David Fyfe, played with gentlemanly rigour by Richard E Grant. Elsewhere, Leo Woodall is Howie Triest, a German-born US soldier able to translate for Kelley; John Slattery is profoundly underutilised as the army officer overseeing the detention of the Nazi high command; while Kiwi Lydia Peckham makes a brief but memorable appearance as Lila, a reporter-turned-femme fatale maintaining a flirtatious relationship with Kelley. For the most part, it is Crowe’s show — his Reichsmarshall is quietly sinister, calculating and unsettlingly magnetic. The film unspools his and the also very-good Malek’s burgeoning relationship with patience and icky candour — it is all too easy in the moment to misplace the knowledge of Göring’s actions during sequences of dialogue between the two. This allows the eventual trial — and the film’s most staggering scene, the playing of documentary footage of the Holocaust to a shocked public — to hit harder. Vanderbilt’s film is, directorially, totally workmanlike — it goes out of its way to avoid anything like experimentation, instead relying on fireworks care of some of our most renowned character actors facing off against each other in a courtroom. It is also, in places, bizarrely upbeat — early sequences of the film, perhaps attempting to parallel the joy the Allies felt at their victory, pre-realisation of the horror that has occurred out of sight, bounce along with an energy that seems to evoke studio-era Hollywood dramas — but our knowledge ensures these sequences’ Sorkin-esque pitter-patter dialogue rankles, rather than amuses. It’s a touch of Hollywood that such a sober subject simply does not need, and which threatens to undercut the gravity of the situation. Thankfully, Vanderbilt commits to the overwhelming darkness of the trial’s denouement — the film intentionally ends on a downbeat note, one that surprised me with its willingness to offer little in the way of consolation. The trials did their job — just — but the impact they had on the lives of the people involved changed them deeply, sometimes fatally.
Nuremberg is in cinemas now.