Producers: Richard Saperstein, Bradley J. Fischer, James Vanderbilt, William Sherak, Frank Smith, Benjamin Tappan, Cherilyn Hawrysh, Istvan Major and George Freeman   Director: James Vanderbilt   Screenplay: James Vanderbilt   Cast: Russell Crowe, Rami Malek, Michael Shannon, Leo Woodall, Richard E. Grant, John Slattery, Mark O’Brien, Colin Hanks, Lydia Peckham, Wrenn Schmidt, Lotte Verbeek and Andreas Pietschmann   Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics

Grade: C+

James Vanderbilt’s film about the first Nuremberg trial begins on May 7, 1945, with a U.S. serviceman ostentatiously urinating on a swastika painted on a piece of roadside debris just as a German limousine pulls up.  Out steps Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) in full uniform, surrendering to the astonished American squad but maintaining a pose of imperious dignity.  He requests the soldiers to get his luggage from the car.

Such a scene actually occurred (though the date seems to have been May 9, not May 7, when the German surrender to the Allies had occurred), but what’s striking about the staging is how theatrical and obvious it is.  That tendency to melodramatic bluntness extends through the film’s two-and-a-half hours.

It can’t, however, diminish the historical importance of the event it dramatizes—the first International Military Tribunal trial held at Nuremberg in 1946, in which Göring and nineteen other Nazi government and military officials were charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity.  (Stanley Kramer’s famous 1961 film was a fictionalized version of another of the IMT trials, the so-called Judges’ Trial of 1947.)

Vanderbilt derives his script from a 2013 book by Jack El-Hai, “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII,” which focuses on the relationship that developed between the imprisoned Göring and American psychologist Kelley (Rami Malek), an Intelligence Corps officer who was tasked, along with others, with certifying the competence of the defendants to stand trial.  

Kelley concluded that they did not represent a particular pathology, but rather a common human proclivity to go along with the environment in which they found themselves, however heinous, and published a book based on his findings, “22 Cells in Nuremberg,” in 1947.  As a postscript in the film shows (rather clumsily), he insisted that under similar circumstances people who acted as the Nazis did could emerge anywhere.  

Vanderbilt’s emphasis is on Göring’s certainty that he could justify his actions, and thus the Nazi regime, if not to the judges, then to the German people.  But “Nuremberg” is broader in scope than the Göring-Kelley interrogation dance.  It begins with the determined, controversial but ultimately successful effort by Associate U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) to establish the IMT, and his service, along with his British counterpart Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe (Richard E. Grant), as chief prosecutors.  It emphasizes Göring’s cunning and confidence as the leader of the defendants, including Rudolf Hess (Andreas Pietschmann), as well as Jackson’s intemperance in grilling him and the success of Maxwell Fyfe in saving the day in the end.

Much of this is based on the historical record, but Vanderbilt is not above point-making in scenes that appear to be invented, or at least embellished, for dramatic effect.  Take, for example, the prominence given Sergeant Howie Triest (Leo Woodall), a German-born American soldier who assisted Kelley and other psychiatrists like Gustave Gilbert (Colin Hanks) as a translator.  Like so many of the characters portrayed here, Triest was a real person, but Vanderbilt pauses the action at one point to have him deliver a lengthy monologue about his life to Kelley that seems contrived just to give Woodall something to do other than trail Malek around.  Then there are the scenes involving Kelley’s involvement with Göring’s wife and daughter; he perhaps met them, but the level of his engagement with them here doesn’t feel credible.

Partially that’s because Malek’s performance is intense but dull.  The same can be said of Shannon, a fine actor reduced to one-note snarling as Jackson.  There’s compensation in Crowe’s flamboyant turn as Göring, and Grant’s amusing contrast to Shannon’s approach as his British colleague.  Curiously, similar strengths and weaknesses in casting can be found in the one previous dramatization of the trial, the TNT mini-series “Nuremberg” of 2000.  Alec Baldwin made a bland Jackson, but Brian Cox was a strong Göring, and Christopher Plummer an excellent Maxwell-Fyfe.

That telefilm followed a trajectory similar to the one here, with a major exception.  The American psychiatrist given the spotlight in the earlier treatment was Gilbert, played by the straightlaced Matt Craven; he does pretty much everything Kelley does here, and is equally uninteresting.  Kelley doesn’t even appear.  The difference can be explained by the fact that David W. Rintels’ script was based on an earlier book, Joseph E. Persico’s 1995 “Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial,” which presumably used Gilbert’s 1950 book “The Psychology of Dictatorship: Based on an Examination of the Leaders of Nazi Germany” as a source.  One can leave it to some later scholar to research whether Kelley or Gilbert, or an amalgam of the two, played most of the part attributed in the two films to one or the other.

Vanderbilt’s film is expertly made from a technical perspective, with Eve Stewart’s production design and Bartholomew Cariss’ costumes evoking the time and place and Dariusz Wolski’s cinematography suitably dour.  Tom Eagles’ editing is solid if not terribly imaginative, and Brian Tyler’s score unobtrusive.

“Nuremberg” is undoubtedly well intentioned; the final caption, “The only clue to what man can do is what man has done,” attributed to the philosopher of history R.G. Collingwood, demonstrates what Vanderbilt, following Kelley, is aiming to impress on viewers.  Unfortunately, as a film it’s but a workmanlike dramatization of an event that deserves to be remembered as a noble attempt to devise a mechanism to deal with those responsible for morally unconscionable political and military acts.  Unfortunately, more recent history has shown how elusive that goal remains.