RUSSELL CROWE, LEO WOODALL, AND RAMI MALEK IN NUREMBERG

Göring and the shrink

SCENE FROM THE FILM

This film is based on a book by Jack El-Hai called The Psychiatrist and the Nazi that began with an eponymous article in Scientific American Min (q.v.). It's an interesting little-known angle on history. US Army Major [url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Kelley"]Douglas M. Kelley[/url] was Chief Psychiatrist at Nuremberg Prison during the first months of the trials tasked with assuring that the 22 prisoners would be fit to go on trial. With Hermann Göring, Reichsmarschall, second in command to Hitler and with multiple other titles, the most important, most charismatic and most fascinating of the prisoners,it became something more than that, so involving for Kelley that he connected with and aided Göring's wife Emmy ( Lotte Verbeek) and daughter Edda (Fleur Bremmer) - and Kelley reluctantly gave documents with information about his conversations with Göring to the trial lawyer. Kelley published a book, always a goal during his times with Göring, but he fell apart later and in 1958 committed suicide in Berekley by cyanide, following Göring's method. Göring's last words to Kelley tell us what we need to know as audience members: this has been his one encounter with greatness and his life is all going to be downhill from here. Rami Malek's native humble, haunted intensity makes him good for this role, and a greatly bulked up Russell Crowe is simply masterful as the supreme Nazi Göring.

While Göring's talks with Kelley begin through an an American Army interpreter, Göring was quite fluent in English so most of the scenes can plausibly be conducted in English. Nuremberg dramatizes the psychiatrist-Göring conversations and sketches in the trial and the executions. It's a disturbing film, not least for Kelley's conclusion from studying Göring and the other Nazis on trial that they were ordinary people, and that Americans could do what they did.

This film is all about three masterful actors. The relationship between Kelley (Rami Malek) and Göring (Russell Crowe) occupies the first half of the film when the prisoners are waiting for the trial. The second half of the 2 1/2 hours focuses on the trials, and in it Michael Shannon is featured as the prosecutor Robert H. Jackson with Crowe's monumentality even more evident as the powerful, confident defendant Hermann Göring. Malek's performance very well shows us the real shrink's actual overinvolvement; Russell Crowe is so monumental I forgot for moments that it was an actor. We should also mention the reliably excellent Richard E. Grant as debonaire British lawyer Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, John Slattery, who was so memorable as Roger Sterling in "Mad Men," as Dr. Kelley's overbearing Army boss Colonel Burton C. Andrus; and Leo Woodall as Sgt. Howie Triest, the soldier at the prison who reveals to Kelley as he is leaving town that he's a German Jew who escaped with his sister to America before the Holocaust. Sgt. Howe's tale may be true and may be helpful for young people who know nothing about WWII, but it feels like an example of how this solid but not brilliant film being over-explanatory, which it is at times.

The very holding of the Nuremberg trials can be questioned. Was a show trial of the losing side of a war a good idea? Robert H. Jackson, the U.S. Supreme Court Justice in charge of the trials, powerfully played by Shannon, presents the argument here in favor of it. But the majority of the most culpable Nazi leaders had already committed suicide. Nonetheless, as is of course explained here, the Nuremberg tribunals were instrumental in the development of the modern-day international court system, setting a precedent for the International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and other standardized methods of dealing with genocide. This makes Nuremberg an important and timely reminder in the wake of the genocide of Israel in Gaza that has just gone on, and continues.

Movies about the trials have been criticized for not living up to the solemnity of the those tribunals or the War itself. Of the breathtakingly star-studded 1970's Judgment at Nuremberg Pauline Kael paraphrased Gavin Lambert: "An all-star concentration-camp drama, with special guest-victim appearances."

Watching this film took me back to my own childhood when this subject was much fresher and we, like the participants in the Nuremberg trials shown here, had only recently discovered what the Nazi "work camps" really were. A five-minute news film of various concentration camps with the horrific piles of carcasses and living corpses is shown here by Justice Jackson as part of his opening presentation in court. It's a slice of raw, hideous reality to wake you up vividly to the fact that this was real stuff.

This film is both an eye-opener for the historically uninformed and a showpiece for the actors. However, I suggest for the history you read books about this subject and for a great cinematic treatment of the WWII banality of evil of far more originality you watch instead Louis Malle's 1974 Lacombe Lucien. My authority on the awards, YouTube's "The Oscar Expert" bros, have said that Nuremberg isn't going to be a contender.

Nuremberg, 148 mins, premiered at TIFF Sept 7, 2025 and was included also at San Sebastian, Zurich, Woodstock, Montclair, Denver, AFI, and a number of other domestic festivals. It opens in US theaters Nov.7, 2025 Metacritic rating: 6̶0̶%̶. Now 62%.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.