There are films that fail because they have nothing to say, and then there are films that fail in a more irritating way: they have something worth saying and still leave it untouched. Nuremberg belongs to the second category. James Vanderbilt has been handed a subject with moral, political and psychological weight: the trial of Nazi leaders, the invention of an international language of accountability, and the question of how intelligence can coexist with extraordinary moral corruption. He also has a formidable cast. Yet the film feels less like cinema than an expensive reconstruction of a film that might have existed if somebody had been brave enough to make it. It keeps announcing its importance instead of earning it. Its greatest achievement is reminding you how much better this material could have been.
Filtering the story through the relationship between psychiatrist Douglas Kelley and Hermann Göring could have been fascinating. Kelley wants to understand the man; Göring understands that being studied gives him another audience. Their exchanges should become a contest over vanity, intelligence, manipulation and psychological explanation. Russell Crowe grasps the opportunity. His Göring is socially agile, self-satisfied and grotesquely comfortable with his own importance. Crowe gives him a persuasive surface, which makes the glimpses beneath it unsettling. Rami Malek, however, never establishes a convincing presence. His performance feels mannered and weightless beside Crowe's. This is not a minor problem: the film depends on a psychological duel between these two men, but one side rarely feels fully alive. Instead of tension, we get an actor carrying scenes while another seems to demonstrate the idea of a troubled, brilliant psychiatrist.
That imbalance would be easier to forgive if the screenplay knew what it wanted to examine. Nuremberg keeps opening doors and wandering away. It gestures toward psychiatric confidentiality, the seduction of proximity to power, the politics behind the tribunal, international justice, and whether evil can be understood without being made fascinating. Each subject could sustain a film. Here, they compete for attention without forming a coherent argument. The trial itself, the event that gives the film its title and gravity, feels like a destination the story is impatient to reach and reluctant to inhabit. Michael Shannon brings authority as Robert H. Jackson, but even he seems trapped in a film that reduces consequential people to functional pieces. The supporting cast is of performers who could have complicated this world. Too many get little more than an entrance, a line and an assignment.
The devastating material arrives when the courtroom is confronted with documentary footage from the liberated camps. Those images do not need Vanderbilt's assistance. They are evidence, not atmosphere; history, not a dramatic device. Their force exposes the weakness of the fiction surrounding them. Suddenly the film has access to a truth its dialogue, performances and solemnity have struggled to approach. Good intentions are an inadequate defence. A film about the Holocaust does not become profound simply because it includes footage of the Holocaust. Historical seriousness does not excuse clumsy pacing, thin characterisation or a screenplay that mistakes emphatic speeches for insight. The subject deserves more than a prestige production that pauses to remind its audience that the subject is important. Respect is not a substitute for artistic judgment.
What frustrates me most is that Nuremberg is not an empty project. There is an idea at its centre: Göring does not need to be a supernatural monster for his crimes to be monstrous, and understanding his personality does not make him less responsible. The film also wants to warn that the conditions permitting authoritarianism are not sealed away in the past. Those are worthwhile ambitions. But the movie handles them with the bluntness of a lecture that distrusts its audience to make connections unaided. It confuses relevance with profundity and solemnity with depth. Crowe gives it a performance worth watching; Shannon offers flashes of moral seriousness; the historical record supplies the weight the filmmaking cannot generate consistently. That is a miserable exchange. Nuremberg has talent, resources and ideas, but little sense of how to shape them into challenging cinema. A total waste of talent and ideas is not an exaggeration. It is the accurate verdict I can give it.
