Nuremberg

The Bureaucracy of Monsters

Historical procedurals usually make me wary. Too many of them file the past down into something neat and finished, a solved puzzle where the heroes look sharp and the villains get ushered toward punishment on cue. James Vanderbilt’s *Nuremberg* is at least trying to disturb that comfort. It wants the claustrophobia of a psychological duel inside the shell of a courtroom drama, even if it keeps pressing its point harder than it needs to. The idea underneath it is chilling enough on its own: what if the men behind the most mechanized genocide in human history were not supernatural monsters, but ordinary, ambitious, brutally efficient bureaucrats? That’s a terrifying place to begin. Whether the film really gets there depends a lot on who happens to own the frame from one scene to the next.



Vanderbilt, still clearly carrying his fascination with systems from David Fincher's *Zodiac*, moves away from the grand theater of the trials and into the cramped cells beneath the courthouse in his adaptation of Jack El-Hai’s nonfiction book *The Nazi and the Psychiatrist*. That’s where American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) is assigned to evaluate the surviving Nazi leadership, especially Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe). You can feel what the director wants: a battle of intellects played out in concrete confinement. But the execution can be awfully blunt. When Göring smiles and explains his devotion to Hitler by saying "he made us feel German again," the contemporary political echo isn’t merely suggested; it’s outlined in heavy marker. I don’t mind the warning. I just wish the movie trusted the audience enough to hear it without being elbowed.

If the movie keeps its footing at all, Russell Crowe is the reason. After years of performances that often felt content to run on volume alone, he’s startlingly controlled here. His Göring isn’t a foaming fanatic. Crowe plays him as a puffed-up narcissist, vain and almost avuncular, which somehow makes him worse. The cruelty hides behind manners and charm. Watch how he moves around that tiny cell: not like a condemned man, but like someone who still believes he’s hosting the evening. It’s easily his best work in more than a decade. *The Irish Times'* Tara Brady had it exactly right when she wrote that Crowe "walks a theatrical line between repulsive and magnetic."



The problem is the person facing him. I honestly never settled on what Rami Malek thinks he’s doing here. Since *Bohemian Rhapsody*, he’s leaned hard into that twitchy, wide-eyed, faintly extraterrestrial mode, and as Kelley it never clicks. He’s meant to be an opportunist slowly unraveling under the pressure of staring into evil, but the performance doesn’t feel rooted in recognizable human behavior. Every line comes out with the same breathy enigma, until Kelley stops reading like a complicated historical figure and starts feeling like an acting exercise. *The Guardian's* Peter Bradshaw was brutal when he called it "an eye-rolling, enigmatic-smiling, scenery-nibbling hamfest," but he wasn’t wrong. Once the interrogator feels stranger than the war criminal, the tension is gone.

For all its lurching structure and mismatched performances, though, *Nuremberg* does contain one stretch I can’t shake. Partway through, US chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon, supplying his usual slab-of-granite authority) decides the room needs to confront what these men actually did. He kills the lights and screens real, unedited footage from the concentration camps. Vanderbilt makes the right choice and simply stays there, holding on the images long enough for the air to curdle. We sit in the dark with the defendants, hearing nothing but the merciless click-clack of the projector. All the slick, Aaron Sorkin-lite chatter from earlier in the film dies on contact with actual mass graves. It’s an ugly collision between Hollywood craft and historical fact, and it works because the movie finally stops performing.



Maybe that ugliness is the point. For all its failings, the film refuses to tuck the Nazis away as some freak aberration beyond the human norm. Kelley’s final, deeply unpopular conclusion is that the capacity for this kind of organized cruelty is not uniquely German; it sits everywhere, waiting for the right economic panic and the right charismatic monster to wake it up. That is an ugly thought, and a necessary one. *Nuremberg* may be a clumsy vehicle for it, weighed down by courtroom clichés and a genuinely distracting lead performance, but the idea still lands like a thrown brick. You leave not reassured that justice happened in 1946, but rattled by how easily the same machinery could be rebuilt.