It was my birthday recently, and that means my girlfriend wanted to do something nice, believing more in experiences than gifts. That had to wait, but then she decided we could see a movie together, something we both would want to see, and it turns out she had just learned that there was a historical drama with an impressive cast she wasn’t aware of–she does not go to the movies nearly as often as I do—and that meant we went to see Nuremberg. You know, good birthday fare.
Oh, I’m sure I’ll see the new Predator later. That is much more my thing than hers.
Nazi second-in-command Herman Goring (Russell Crowe) unexpectedly surrenders to the Americans. The question then becomes what to do with him. Most of the other high-ranking members of the Nazi government committed suicide. The obvious thing would be to just execute him and get it over with. But Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) has another idea: put him and the other captured members of the Nazi command on trial. There’s no precedent for such a thing, but Jackson believes it should happen because the Nazis took over through legal means and should be brought down once and for all the same way. To that end, the Army brings in Dr. Douglas Kelley (Rumi Malek) to psychoanalyze Goring and the other captured leaders.
Kelley, however, realizes something very quickly: Goring is not an idiot. Sure, he is a narcissist who thinks far too highly of himself given his situation, but he’s no fool. He has to be there precisely because he wants to be. As Kelley works to gain Goring’s confidence, it’s not hard to see why Goring got as far as he did: he is a very charming man in many ways, and many of his concerns are the same sorts of concerns any other human being might have, namely the state of wife and young daughter. Kelley may have come to this case, in part, to crack the Nazis open and see that they pay, then to go write a best-selling book on the nature of evil, but what he discovers about these men as he talks to them may be far, far more than he would have wanted to find out.
My girlfriend and I, as the credits rolled, were pretty much blown away by what we saw. There’s a veritable murderer’s row of actors in this one, some I recognized like John Slattery, Richard E. Grant, and Colin Hanks, and others like Leo Woodall, here seen as Kelley’s German translator Sgt. Howie Triest, that I will want to keep an eye out for in the future. But the main draws here among the cast are Crowe and Malkek. Malek has the more conventional role, essentially the movie’s protagonist, the guy who came for glory and left with a more disquieting notion about the human race. His performance, like many of his better ones, is of a man who follows his own path, a smart man who realizes he may not like where he’s headed while trying to maintain his standards. Sure, there are some on-the-nose moments, like when he is blatantly smoking in front of a “no smoking” sign, but Malek turns in a solid performance here.
But the real draw here is Crowe. I’ve seen Crowe in a number of things in recent years where he’s just taking a role for the paycheck or maybe to have some fun, but he is legitimately trying here, and it shows. His Goring is charming when he needs to be and monstrous when he has to be, whether it’s chatting about human nature and politics with Kelley or looking utterly bored at the trial scenes when he isn’t on the stand. There’s never a feeling, not for very long at least, that he isn’t in complete control of his own personal domain, never a moment where he isn’t getting everything he wants for himself, the handful of times he’s taken by surprise where his loss of control is only momentary as he quickly adjusts to the situation with a mild look and nothing more. His performance goes a long way to make the movie’s main point about Goring and the others, and if Crowe isn’t at least in the mix for something during awards season, I will be either surprised or there were a lot of other, much-better performances popping up out there that I haven’t seen yet.
Grade: A
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