{"id":210029,"date":"2025-09-08T11:05:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-08T11:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/210029\/"},"modified":"2025-09-08T11:05:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-08T11:05:09","slug":"russell-crowe-as-nazi-war-criminal-hermann-goring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/210029\/","title":{"rendered":"Russell Crowe as Nazi War Criminal Hermann G\u00f6ring"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn \u201cNuremberg<\/a>,\u201d Russell Crowe<\/a>, portly and imposing, with slicked-back hair, a head that seems to melt into his body, and a low-voiced German accent that expresses implacable self-satisfaction, plays Hermann G\u00f6ring<\/a>, second in command of the Nazi regime, just after his surrender at the end of World War II. G\u00f6ring, along with 21 other members of the Nazi high command, gets taken to a prison in Nuremberg, where he\u2019ll stand trial for war crimes in the first such international tribunal in history. Given the fate that likely awaits him (his crimes will be held up to the light for the world to see; his prosecutors will seek the death penalty), G\u00f6ring exudes a very unruffled sense of well-being. The point seems to be that the Nazi leaders, among other things, were pathological narcissists, and that this is what narcissism can lock you into: a state of unreal self-belief. (G\u00f6ring, like Hitler, is also a drug addict, one who takes 40 opiate pills a day. That, too, has a way of tamping down on self-doubt.)<\/p>\n

\n\tG\u00f6ring will be questioned in court by members of the International Military Tribunal, all representing the Allies who defeated Germany. But in \u201cNuremberg,\u201d before the trial begins, his principal interrogator is U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek<\/a>), a psychiatrist whose ostensible purpose is to determine whether G\u00f6ring is fit to stand trial. It\u2019s obvious from minute one, though, that he\u2019s more than fit. Really, what Kelley seeks to explore \u2014 and what the audience wants him to explore \u2014\u00a0is the nature of evil, which is to say G\u00f6ring\u2019s relationship to his own crimes. And on that score, neither he nor the movie get very far.<\/p>\n

\n\tKelley susses out that G\u00f6ring is pretending not to understand or speak English, and for a couple of scenes that gives the shrink a leg up. (Crowe learned a lot of dialogue in German, but it isn\u2019t long before G\u00f6ring drops this charade.) Yet when Kelley confronts G\u00f6ring with what the Nazis did, G\u00f6ring\u2019s defense is simple: He claims he didn\u2019t know. He thought the \u201cwork camps\u201d were\u2026work camps. (It was Heinrich Himmler, Hitler\u2019s number three, who more directly oversaw the Holocaust.) It\u2019s obvious that G\u00f6ring is lying. In his egomaniacal way, he\u2019s a lot like the infamous Adolf Eichmann (who wouldn\u2019t be apprehended and put on trial until 1960), spinning out an elaborate lawyerly scenario of denial. That\u2019s the brick wall that Kelley is up against. In a way, \u201cNuremberg\u201d is up against it too.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film is two-and-a-half hours long, and it\u2019s very much an old-school Oscar movie, full of stately studio staging (the bombed-out ruins, the creamy dark-toned courtroom, the name actors playing crucial figures from history). Written and directed by James Vanderbilt, who has a rather eclectic resume (his most prominent credits are writing the screenplays for \u201cZodiac\u201d and \u201cThe Amazing Spider-Man\u201d), it feels like the most prestigious Hollywood WWII drama of 1988. The film presents itself as lavishly somber and important and includes several not-so-veiled references to the rise of intolerance, and the need to maintain international standards of justice, in the world today.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut \u201cNuremberg,\u201d competent and watchable as it is, isn\u2019t big on psychological tension or insight. It\u2019s supposed to be an irony that G\u00f6ring and Kelley become \u201cfriends,\u201d or at least that they establish an intimate intellectual bond, sort of like Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter. But Rami Malek, while he brings a conversational energy to the role, also brings a weird insecurity; along the way, his Kelley almost seems to forget what his job is. Crowe, in contrast, acts with consummate command even as G\u00f6ring, by design, keeps the audience at arm\u2019s length.<\/p>\n

\n\tAt one point, footage from the concentration camps is shown at the trial \u2014 presented to the world for the first time \u2014 and watching \u201cNuremberg\u201d we see the actual, hideous documentary footage (piles of corpses, a walking human skeleton), which to be honest felt a bit jarring to me in such a glossy conventional awards-bait context. Michael Shannon is very good as Robert H. Jackson, the Supreme Court justice who leads the prosecution, and his Jackson seems up to the challenge\u2026until he puts G\u00f6ring on the stand and fumbles the ball. He allows G\u00f6ring to make the case that what he thought he was doing was solving \u201cthe Jewish question\u201d by simply having all the Jews of Germany emigrate. (A nice Final Solution.) It\u2019s up to Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe (Richard E. Grant), the British prosecutor, to take the reins and finally ask G\u00f6ring a question that provokes a \u201cYou can\u2019t handle the truth!\u201d response \u2014 namely, having watched the concentration-camp footage, would he still swear fealty to Hitler? G\u00f6ring says that he would. Thus sealing his death sentence.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe movie tries to leave us with the message that the Nazis shouldn\u2019t be viewed as larger-than-life; they were human beings. But the film\u2019s whole conception of Hermann G\u00f6ring is that he kind of was larger-than-life. Unlike a movie such as Jonathan Glazer\u2019s \u201cThe Zone of Interest,\u201d \u201cNuremberg\u201d never truly lays bare the man behind the evil myth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In \u201cNuremberg,\u201d Russell Crowe, portly and imposing, with slicked-back hair, a head that seems to melt into his…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":210030,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[171,115246,53,101718,101719,26342,77123,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-210029","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-hermann-gu00f6ring","10":"tag-movies","11":"tag-nuremberg","12":"tag-rami-malek","13":"tag-russell-crowe","14":"tag-toronto-film-festival","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115168354414950305","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210029\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/210030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}