Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits…

Our final theatrical screening of the festival, and their official Closing Night selection, was also the very first entrant I bought tickets for, based on a single selling point: Academy Award Winner Russell Crowe IS Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring IN Nuremberg! And that must be announced or imagined in the deepest possible Epic Voice Guy voice or else why bother.

Same as with the Academy Awards, World War II and the Holocaust are common subjects in Heartland selections, for reasons tragically obvious to anyone who’s seen enough of them and nevertheless supports the important, evergreen “Never Forget” message behind them. Nuremberg wasn’t the only such film on the docket, but it was certainly the highest-profile one. Its writer/director James Vanderbilt has worked on numerous big-budget crowd-pleasers (the last three Screams and both Amazing Spider-Mans, among others) and recruited a strong ensemble to tell this particular story, of which the indisputable highlight is — for those just joining us — Maximus himself as Göring, the bombastic narcissist and highest-ranking Nazi still alive after the war, the sort of boo-able real-life Kingpin in more ways than one, whose every move and every haughty gaze was like a steamroller through every room he entered.

(His name can also be spelled “Goering”, for those who hate umlauts or ASCII characters. If you don’t know German vowel sounds, the important thing is it never rhymes with “boring”.)

(Full disclosure: longtime MCC readers well know this is all totally within the bailiwick of my wife Anne, a dedicated WWII history aficionado who’s read hundreds of books on the subject from her teenage years onward. This was the only Heartland screening she attended this year — not just because Nuremberg fell squarely into her zone of interest, but it was also among the precious few screenings of any of this year’s films that fit into her personal schedule. Once the fun trivia starts ramping up in the next several paragraphs, rest assured those tidbits were largely from her input. Corrections will be made later, once she’s pointed out everything I got wrong after I click “Publish”.)

Previously on WWII: after Germany’s surrender, Allied forces caught (or accepted the surrenders of) 22 high-ranking Nazi officials before they could get shot on sight or commit suicide first. Rather than immediate execution, they were to be judged for their crimes at the famous Nuremberg trials that lasted from November 1945 to October 1946. (Two others were accused as well but are each Sir Not Appearing in This Film: Nazi Party Secretary Martin Bormann was MIA and his remains weren’t discovered till 1972; and major industrialist Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach — whose lineage was so prestigious that that isn’t even his full name — was deemed physically unfit to stand trial. His story alone would’ve added another full-page text postscript. Suffice it to say courtroom justice came for him later.)

The trials in themselves were no small feat, as the concept of an international war-crimes tribunal was unprecedented. No one had committed genocide on a worldwide scale and been captured and kept alive to face a trial after having the audacity to plead Not-Guilty. The film whittles down the bureaucratic setup and housekeeping into a subplot for Michael Shannon (recovered from the ignominy of The Flash) as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who’d become lead prosecutor even though he was somewhat rusty at it after spending years on the other side of the bench. (Anyone with big hopes for a ferocious Jor-El/Zod Man of Steel rematch between him and Crowe may be saddened by Vanderbilt’s adherence to the historical record. They do butt heads, but Jackson was no Zod.)

The primary narrative focuses on a key aspect of American pretrial proceedings that was carried over to Nuremberg: proving the defendants are competent enough to stand trial and can’t cop out with an insanity defense. Academy Award Winner Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody) is U.S. Army psychiatrist Lt. Col. Douglas Kelley, who acted as chief psychiatrist in the profiling of all the defendants. Other than a montage of administering Rorschach tests to various uncooperative or plain weird elderly Nazis, Vanderbilt mostly limits Kelley’s scope to just Göring, in lieu of trying to finance a repetitive 13-episode miniseries.

So it’s Malek v. Crowe, the young-ish military man versus the elder statesman-monster, in a one-on-one psychological duel, kinda like Starling v. Lecter, or all the ripoffs thereof. Crowe delivers his best performance in ages, benefiting from the bulked-up physique he bore in Kraven the Hunter to campier effect, almost as if he’d actually been weight-training for this part and not just allowing himself to age naturally. His Göring dons self-imagined dignity and unimpeachable respectability as his delusional armor of choice, maintaining his fervent allegiance to Hitler to the very end and daring anyone to take him down. Crowe underplays the notorious narcissist with a calmer approach that doesn’t mean lots of screaming, his steely visage assuring all comers that in his mind he’s The Greatest, a champion undefeated in the ring.

Surprisingly, Malek shouts more than Crowe does. Ordinarily such a film would valorize its protagonist into a heroic saint, which is the vibe at first. As their relationship is crafted one meet-brute at a time, Malek enters the consummate professional, but slowly begins to show signs of tension and curious choices. The sessions escalate to one really effective shouting match between our two principals, a debate about certain false equivalences. Malek’s verbose outburst — a convoluted if fair response to a common knee-jerk criticism among internet armchair diplomats — knocked our audience back in their seats. Göring’s pulse never rises above 85, even when we think Kelley might’ve just swallowed his own tongue.

We haven’t yet read the book that Vanderbilt adapted, Jack El-Hai’s The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, though Anne’s now placed a hold on a copy at our local library. She was unfamiliar with Kelley going into this, so we were both surprised as Nuremberg‘s second half steers toward the predictable psychodrama pitfall of flaunting psychiatric ethics and a doctor getting too close to their subject. But then his spiral continues downward, to the point when we realize it isn’t just a standard Act Two crisis-of-faith, but in fact foreshadows how Kelley was effectively benched later on. (At the end, the requisite “Whatever Happened To…?” standard historical-drama text epilogue reveals Kelley’s final fate, but keeps it short and simple, and demurs from revealing the horrid details.)

Vanderbilt can only fit so much into 2½ hours, so the timeline is necessarily truncated. (Amid the other sobplots, the Göring family’s lengthy incarceration is practically treated as an overnight drunk-tank stay.) The final act at long last brings the courtroom drama we were expecting. Shannon’s sections are kept as brief as possible so as to mercifully shorten the pages and pages of textbook exposition that he and other cast members had to memorize and recite, with mixed results. Jackson’s well-known, much-lauded opening statement is mercifully compressed into a micro-mini-supercut (you can watch at least the first 110 minutes of it online) and his dire missteps are winnowed down into a single cross-examination excerpt. Shannon’s humble portrayal of that real-life moment of weakness clears a path for special guest Richard E. Grant (whom I last saw in Saltburn) as Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, secondary counsel for the prosecution. As pretty much happened, Grant comes up off the bench and provides a too-short sample of Fyfe’s assured skills, demonstrating why he’s owed the most credit for eventually “getting” Göring on the stand. More Fyfe would’ve been most welcome, had Vanderbilt been given an extra half-hour’s space.

Random little flaws jumped out and bugged us from time to time. Though I did like how Jojo Rabbit editor Tom Eagles spliced flashes of newspaper-photog stills into the trial scenes, some of the quick-cut scene changes create deeply jarring juxtapositions more hilarious than was probably intended (possibly a lingering side effect of handling four Taika Waititi films). Brian Tyler’s score largely hews to the Very Important Drama track, but gets a bit much at the first courtroom entrances are accompanied by a battalion of 1776 snare-drummers. An occasional anachronism leaks into the dialogue, such as an angry officer railing at modern-PC “mental health professionals” rather than the likelier “head-shrinkers”. Either they got the courtroom seating chart wrong or some defendants bear no resemblance to their counterparts. (In particular, they chickened out on rendering the full, woodsy depth of Hess’ infamously off-putting unibrow.) And Anne and I both winced when one character mispronounces “Goebbels” twice in a row. PSA: IT IS NOT PRONOUNCED “GURBLES”. THERE IS NO UNWRITTEN ‘R’ IN IT. AND IT DOES NOT RHYME WITH “NOBLES”! THANK YOU.

Despite the précis approach, the trial covers the most salient points, including several minutes of actual concentration-camp footage, a horrifying yet necessary requirement for any film dealing with the Holocaust, to the extent that they could do so within the PG-13 rating. At times Nuremberg can feel like the sort of old-fashioned dramas they don’t release in theaters anymore except for Oscar qualification, and often not even then. But calling it “old-fashioned” implies such messages as “Nazis suck” and “genocide = bad” might ever be considered out-of-fashion. Within the limitations at hand, Vanderbilt stays faithful to the gist of what happened, resists Hollywoodizing to a certain extent, and could help inform younger audiences who’re woefully ignorant of all this. Avant-garde “progressive” approaches can work as Art in their own manner, but keeping the unadorned history and an entire generation’s traumatic memories alive are entirely in keeping with the “Never Forget” message. Because…well, look: do you want Nazis? Because not talking about the evils of Nazism is how you get Nazis.

And if you’re thinking to yourself that dramatizations have already been done and everyone can go watch those, well, yes, albeit in smaller productions and documentaries, mostly in decades past, which 99.9% of all audiences are unlikely to go track down. Folks are far more reachable with more current works using higher production values and more familiar actors encouraging them to come see. There’s very little overlap with the acclaimed Judgment at Nuremberg, which technically covered the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials of 1947, which were a rather different act in the same saga. That film also weirdly chose to tell the story with entirely fictionalized characters, nary a real name used, so it’s basically a separate canon, the Nuremberg of Earth-2.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Leo Woodall (The White Lotus) is Howard Triest, one of the Army translators who acted as go-between for the defendants and the psychiatrists. The film condenses all the translators into him as a single representative, only shows him facilitating Kelley and Göring (even after everyone realizes he was superfluous), and hides his backstory for a Shocking Plot Twist reveal later on. To his credit, Woodall is a charismatic performer and even gets a tear-jerking For Your Oscar Consideration speech, complete with orchestral whole notes backing him up for value-added heft.

Mad Men‘s John Slattery is Burton Andrus, Nuremberg’s prison commandant during the trial, afforded a few instances of Roger Sterling comic relief. Colin Hanks portrays psychologist Gustave Gilbert, who assisted Kelley with the Rorschach tests, but is rewritten as an antagonist — The Other Psychiatrist who’s brought in for second opinions when Our Hero begins to show signs of professional compromise. Mark O’Brien (Ready or Not, Bad Times at the El Royale) is Colonel John Amen, the prison’s Chief Interrogator. (Fun trivia: he was Grover Cleveland’s son-in-law!)

Not all the defendants are named or given screen time, but Andreas Pietschmann (Netflix’s Dark) is Rudolf Hess, feigning amnesia after he’s brought in from the Tower of London.

Among the very few women around, Wrenn Schmidt (For All Mankind, Person of Interest) is Justice Jackson’s secretary, Elsie Douglas. Lotte Verbeek (Outlander, Jarvis’ wife in Agent Carter) is Emmy Göring, Hermann’s Concerned Wife.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Nuremberg end credits, though they reveal the children’s rhyme “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” does indeed have credited writers. Longtime fans of the World War II Cinematic Universe will also appreciate the Easter-egg use of a Chopin number, thus implying Nuremberg is in the same cinematic universe as The Pianist.