Nuremberg Marks Hollywood's Return to a Certain Rhetoric We Didn't Miss Too Much

The new century had just begun when Hollywood churned out a film centered on the same events and with the same massive runtime as the film approved for release in late 2025, presented these hours at the Turin Film Festival. A quarter of a century later, it's interesting to understand what has remained unchanged and what has instead changed in the sensibility and attitude with which Hollywood tries to recount a crucial moment at the end of World War II, a first time that ended, however, without the missing sense of catharsis for which the entire operation had been designed.

Alec Baldwin was the protagonist of another Nuremberg: a film also centered on the trial of Nazi leaders captured at the end of the war, the first true implementation and courtroom application of international law. At the time, Brian Cox played Hitler's second-in-command and the highest-ranking official of the Third Reich, Hermann Göring, in a three-hour film focused on the legal proceedings and the American prosecutor who advocated for its establishment and led the prosecution.

The Plot of Nuremberg

Twenty-five years later, James Vanderbilt's Nuremberg clocks in at 148 minutes and gives Michael Shannon the role that was Alec Baldwin's, but above all, assigns Russell Crowe the sinister character of Hermann Göring: the head of the Reich, the most influential and charismatic Nazi in the group of prisoners captured and tried, who surrendered voluntarily to the Allied Forces in Austria, almost as if to challenge them. If Göring falls and is condemned by a fair trial, the other leaders will fall with him, and the dark historical chapter of Nazism will be definitively closed. This is the premise of a film that only theoretically stars Oscar winner Rami Malek. This time, in fact, the film dedicates only its second half to the actual trial, focusing on the studies of psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, a real historical figure who for months conversed with the Nazi prisoners in Nuremberg to ascertain their sanity and ability to stand trial. From that experience came a book on the psychoanalysis of evil that inspires the film, written by the director Vanderbilt himself: a professional with a very curious career, Nuremberg being his second directorial effort. As a screenwriter, however, he has written truly everything: from Fincher's masterpiece Zodiac to mass-market films like The Amazing Spider-Man, Independence Day, and some of the most recent chapters of the Scream franchise.

It's clear that many things have happened between the two cinematic Nurembergs: Mindhunter, for example, David Fincher's splendid serial creation which, though incomplete and not very successful, has become an indispensable starting point for psychological narratives like this one, in which a brilliant mind investigator confronts absolute evil and must resist its fascination, inevitably remaining marked by it. The real Kelley, in fact, is a tragic figure, an unheeded Cassandra who, from his conversations with Göring, produced a book warning against the replicability of what happened in Germany in the Second World War. In the film's version, he is a self-assured and very ambitious young man who ends up becoming more involved than expected by his dialogues with Hermann Göring, his main object of study in an attempt to understand what makes horrors like the Holocaust possible.

Malek's performance is quite exaggerated for a very stereotypical character who serves as an aid to the film's point and the true protagonist of the film: Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring. Although not exactly at the center of the scene, Nuremberg is primarily about him, transforming from a courtroom drama into a clinical and human portrait of a personality as arrogant and narcissistic as it is undoubtedly charismatic and magnetic. This is the main interpretive key of the film, which sees the good guys (needless to say, all Americans, saved at the last minute in their naivety by minimal interventions from supporting characters like Richard E. Grant's Anglo-Saxon criminal lawyer) barely managing to hold their own against Hermann Göring's formidable mind and remarkable eloquence. The point is the now proverbial banality of evil, the warning that under the right conditions, any person can become a vector of unprecedented levels of cruelty. The film, however, combines this maxim with the necessity of being able to count on exceptional people. Thus, Nuremberg saves itself from the accusation of excessively praising the Nazi leader it portrays, with the simple and effective interpretation that even absolute evil needs unusual ingenuity, acumen, and charisma.

The Crowe Enigma: Why is he playing the German Göring?

The construction of Nuremberg in this sense is truly classic: the psychiatrist slowly gains the trust of his patient, but does not realize the very deep bond, bordering on bromance, that he establishes with him, until his life is forever changed. Not so much by the realization of how Hermann Göring is in fact the monster that the Nuremberg trial attempts to condemn, but by the necessity of betraying his trust to bring him to justice. The story of the tug-of-war between the Americans, Halley, and Hitler's second-in-command proceeds with all the hallmarks of adaptations from other times, where the point is not so much veracity as a certain ritualistic emphasis, a certain rhetoric of good versus evil, while still allowing the latter to be fascinating.

It's a studio film designed for the consumption of viewers who are content with a general overview of what happened in reality, where the most powerful scenes are the archival footage projected at the trial and shown to the audience, obviously punctuated by sequences in which we see the protagonists react in shock, crying or looking away, while Göring puts on his dark glasses and maintains the mystery about his reaction. Twenty years ago, films that brought actors to the Oscars were built this way: Crowe proves to be a product of that school, he who has received multiple nominations, demonstrating the dramatic intensity to carry an entire film centered on the mystery of his character.

Nuremberg marks his first time in this sense as the villain, or rather, almost a totemic evil, shrouded in the identity of absolute wickedness of Nazism. It's not easy to judge his performance, which is the pivot around which the entire operation revolves. On the one hand, Crowe hasn't been seen in such good form for a long time: even with a less naturalistic, exaggerated, and somewhat self-satisfied approach, his Hermann Göring works great, conveying to the audience both the leader's limitations (narcissism, perfectly concealed cruelty) and his great mind as a strategist and calculator (which he obviously crowns by keeping his initial promise not to end up on the gallows, denying the catharsis and legitimacy that those who won the war are seeking). Malek in this sense is the perfect counterpart, because he has the same limitations and flaws as Crowe, but even more exaggerated, thus making his New Zealand colleague appear more measured. Indeed, despite its very long runtime, the film works and entertains precisely thanks to the classic but very enjoyable duel between the two.

Goering vs Churchill

However, a fundamental question remains: why choose Russell Crowe, who learned to speak German for this role (which he alternates with English in the film), when the roster of Teutonic actors is certainly not short of performers who can tackle the role, speaking German as a native speaker, English with a natural Teutonic accent, and perhaps resembling the original more closely? The answer, cynically, we know: the underlying reason why Nuremberg exists is because Crowe was hoping for a big hit, an Oscar nomination, a career relaunch that many "yeses" to far inferior films have somewhat tarnished. Unfortunately for him, it's a particularly rich year for quality male performances, and the competition will be fierce. How can Crowe be blamed when Gary Oldman made the same move, with the same goal, with Darkest Hour, playing Churchill? The answer is simple: apart from Oldman's acting caliber (which is on a whole other level), the English actor was perfect for embodying the spirit of the character in a film that did not bend historical truth to its Oscar-winning needs, but rather, made audacious artistic decisions because it was guided by a filmmaker like Joe Wright.

Nuremberg, on the other hand, is all about dollies and precise camera movements, perhaps a bit cloying and rhetorical like some of its plot points, but still effective narratively. James Vanderbilt, however, is not Joe Wright, and his merit is to still make an otherwise grotesque (and mercenary) film interesting in how it uses the trial against the Nazi establishment for not entirely noble purposes. It's not such an unusual move, in short, and, if not with the utmost grace, James Vanderbilt still turns it into an enjoyable film to watch, especially for genre lovers. Nevertheless, a somewhat bitter taste remains in wondering why not write a fictional story based on the same premises, to give Crowe the opportunity to shine. The answer is simple: alongside the actor's name, Nuremberg uses the sinister appeal of Nazism to get noticed. The banality of the marketability of evil to the general public, one might say.