“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Edmund Burke
Regardless of where an audience stands, left or right, co-writer/director James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg forces everyone to confront evil and understand it before it rears its ugly head again. Six million Jews in The Holocaust died because architects of the Nazi regime, like second in command to Hitler Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring (Russell Crowe), became the embodiment of elusive evil couched in charm and cunning. Like us, psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Remi Malek) is charged to test the insanity of its captured leaders.
This thrillingly-acted biopic centering on the Nuremberg trials compels the audience to think about the reasons such horrors could come at the hands of the over-weight, amoral Goring, exuding a self confidence and charm so antithetical to the crime. The crew of film artists, in the spirit of Oscar-winner Oppenheimer, immerses us in the dark revelations of evil that emerge after the” taking of toast and tea.”
The biopic also reveals the irony of Goring having a lovely wife and daughter when Kelly visits in his bid to assess Goring’s sanity if he is qualified to stand trial. He is, and he did, and he beat the gallows by cyanide suicide.What wasn’t defeated was the world’s hunger to understand this depraved man and his cohorts as they planned the extermination of an entire race.
Representing the world in its search for justice is chief U.S. prosecutor Justice Robert H. Jakson (Michael Shannon), a stolid attorney bound to truth just as the accused perps were to atrocity. This film is, like the unrepentant Goring, determined, while it reveals the workings of that evil so it doesn’t happen again. Is it relevant to today’s world leaning to fascism? perhaps.
Nuremberg is an example of high cinematic art that pleases an aesthetic need for excellence and a caution about the insidious nature of tyranny.
The film illuminates what Hannah Arendt later called “the banality of evil.” A first-rate film for our times.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take (recently listed by Feedspot as two of the ten best NPR Movie Podcasts) out of WCBE 90.5 FM, Columbus, Ohio.Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com