Nuremberg (5/10)

by Tony Medley

158 minutes

PG-13

I was really looking forward to this film and that is often the kiss of death for a movie. And it was here.

Written and directed by James Vanderbilt, the first 75 minutes are about army psychiatrist Dr. Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) and his boy crush on Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe). This part of the movie sets  the stage for the confrontation between Chief United States Prosecutor Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) and Göring much later in the film, and establishes Göring’s charm. But that could have been easily done in less than 30 minutes. Throughout these 75 minutes, I kept wondering why they were so uninvolving that I actually had to fight nodding off several times. I kept saying to myself, “get on with it!”

So why did this biopic of the Nuremberg trials turn into a maudlin story of a little-known psychiatrist? I asked the PR firm if the producers had any backup or authentication for this part of the story and received no response. So I looked in the Production Notes. They are provided to film critics and generally contain a short synopsis of the story and maybe some details about how it was produced and sometimes how it came to be produced. They are generally short, maybe 5-15 pages at the most, including bios of the main cast and crew.

These production notes, on the contrary, are almost as long as a novella, 45 pages! But they do explain how they got it wrong. Decades ago, Vanderbilt came across an arcane book, “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist” by Jack El-Hai. Although the Notes refer to it as “bestselling,” a search reveals that there are no available sales figures and it is referred to as “not a bestseller,” and that Overall U.S. sales were “relatively low.” Misrepresenting this is not a good way to establish credibility and verisimilitude.

Vanderbilt bought into El-Hai’s narrative hook, line, and sinker, but who knows how accurate it is? The story is that Kelley concluded that Göring and his fellow Nazi leaders “were not clinical psychopaths or monsters,” but were “disturbingly ordinary men…capable of orchestrating remarkable crimes under the right conditions.”

According to this thesis, this wasn’t what the powers that be wanted to hear, so Kelley was relatively quickly replaced by psychologist Gustave Gilbert (Colin Hanks) whose opinion was that “the Nazi leaders exhibited profound moral and emotional deficits – qualities he regarded as pathological and emblematic of an innate capacity for evil,” which was apparently what the bosses wanted to hear.

The more entertaining part of the film is sort of revisionist history about Jackson, who has, heretofore, been lauded as a self-effacing hero, sacrificing his chance at being Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to take on the task of getting justice for war criminals. In fact, as shown here, Jackson completely messed up his 2½ day examination of Göring, who outcharmed and dominated him, showing Jackson’s inexperience in criminal trial work, and was saved by British barrister, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe (Richard E. Grant), who jumped in and revitalized the examination.

That said, the term “revisionist history” has generally had a pejorative connotation. However, just because it is “revisionist” does not mean that it is inaccurate. This telling of Jackson’s lack of competence is a bright shining light on something that has heretofore been buried or ignored. Although if the outcome of any trial is known at the outset of the story, this one takes the cake, so whether or not Fyfe did save Jackson, the resulting death penalties would undoubtedly have still been imposed.

There is no record that I can find of Kelley having any kind of relationship with Jackson as shown in this movie. Since it forms the basis of the film, it detracts from the true story. In fact, since Kelley was replaced after six weeks, much of the historic relationship with Göring rested with Gilbert, whose role is minimized and fictionalized.

Crowe steals the film with an Oscar®-quality performance, and Shannon expertly captures Jackson’s ineptitude, but the film needed a much better script and a good editor. Nevertheless, when the director has written the script and is part of the producing team, the result is usually a film that is too long and needs cutting by an unbiased editor and producer.