Bearing the name of one of the wealthiest families in American history, James Vanderbilt has covered the gamut of genre in his screenwriting career. Having dashed off David Fincher’s Zodiac, The Amazing Spider-Man, Slender Man, and Netflix’s Murder Mystery films, Vanderbilt took to directing with 2015’s Truth starring Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes set during the Iraq War. The film critiqued abuses of power during the George W. Bush administration – a subject at the heart of Vanderbilt’s latest venture, Nuremberg. His depiction of the trial which brought down Herman Göring as the sole surviving bastion of the Third Reich is a thinly veiled attack on the rise of fascism in the US today, and ultimately comes across as clumsy and superficial.
A group of Allied troops are stationed on a road as a German car grinds to a halt. Enter a comically bloated Russell Crowe as Göring, padded up in much the same prosthetics donned by Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump in Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice. There is no rise in Nuremberg, only fall. Once Göring enters American custody, he is assigned a psychiatrist to stop the former Reichsmarschall from taking his life before the Allies can do it for him at the hangman’s noose. Enter Rami Malek as Lt. Colonel Douglas Kelley, from whom Göring learns English astonishingly fast. Vanderbilt stages Nuremberg as a two-hander battle of wits between these two men, with Crowe and Malek blustering his way through streams of Holocaust denial and affirmation.
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Vanderbilt’s intention is clear – as Hannah Arendt famously observed in Eichmann in Jerusalem, there is a banality to the evil committed by the Nazis. Göring is shown not as an unrepresentable monster, but as a husband and a father who cares deeply for those he loves and his old friends with whom he marched the corridors of power in Berlin. Vanderbilt’s intention is so clear that he has Göring state this explicitly. When Kelley leaves his prison cell for the last time, Göring wonders if when he and others write of what happened in Germany during the Second World War, they will even acknowledge that he was human. The screenplay is filled with such ‘profound’ one-liners, debating questions of greatness and legacy, always with a knowing wink to a contemporary audience.
When Kelley is promoting his book on the wireless at the end of the film, he is chastised for daring to suggest fascism and Nazism could exist in America, ending with Kelley walking towards the camera in front of a framed star-spangled banner. He has moved away from purely capitalistic interest in understanding the Nazi mind to philanthropy, apparently accounting for Vanderbilt’s own turn from blockbuster cinema to morality historical drama. When asked why Göring supported Hitler, he tells Kelley that “he made us feel German again”. The obviousness of the MAGA parallel feels irresponsible, branding Holocaust denial and the anti-semitic Nuremberg laws as precursors to Trumpian “fake news” and immigration policy. Vanderbilt seems to have his intentions in the right place, but the delivery has all the substance of Crowe’s prosthetic belly.