Last night I sat through James Vanderbilt‘s Nuremberg, all 148 minutes’ worth. It was a 10:15 pm show, and within 10 minutes I’d begun surfing and texting out of boredom. I was semi-flabbergasted by how rote and so-whatty it all felt. I was riveted by Vanderbilt’s writing and direction of Truth ten years ago but this felt like an AMC or Hulu docudrama.
Russell Crowe and Rami Mallek‘s vigorous, snappy-charm performances as Herman Goring and Douglas Kelley aside, the film exudes stodgy mediocrity at every turn.
Note #1: I hated Dariusz Wolski‘s subdued brown-and-white pallete. A dreary, underlighted brown and white mixed with vague hints of gray and olive drab. “Fuck this cinematography and fuck Wolski in general,” I was muttering to myself. “I have to sit through two and a half hours of this?”
Note #2: I found John Slattery, Richard E. Grant and Michael Shannon‘s performances as dull prosecutors especially difficult to sit through. Slattery was so great in Madmen and even in Spotlight, but here he’s like an overdose of klonopin. Droopy, sour-faced Shannon was a godsend in Revolutionary Road, but his portrayal of prosecutor and future Supreme Court justice Robert H. Jackson is lethal — Crowe’s Goring is guilty of horrendous war crimes, I was reminding myself, but as I sat there I was honestly more interested in seeing Jackson hung or shot by a firing squad.
Note #3: I despised Leo Woodall‘s character in the first White Lotus saga (’22), but I double-triple-quadruple hated his portrayal of German translator Sgt. Howie Triest in Nuremberg…go fug yourself, ya chubby-faced, attention-seeking actor, using your watery eyes to convey repressed emotions…die!
Note #4: The third-act scene in which the notoriously antiSemitic Julius Streicher goes to the gallows is an accurate representation of how this despicable fellow died (i.e., like a whiney coward), but I deeply resented a shot of urine leaking down on his legs and dampening his socks and shoes after his body has dropped. Hanging victims always evacuate waste when their neck snaps. Why exactly am I being shown this? Hard and fast HE rule: No urine depictions of any kind, ever, under any condition or circumstance.
Note #5: In custody the overweight Goring dropped 60 pounds before his trial. He wasn’t slender on the stand, but he certainly wasn’t as fat as Crowe appears. Crowe should have slimmed down before filming began.
Note #6: During the closing credit crawl we’re told that Mallek’s Kelley character, a well-educated and highly regarded psychologist who authored a 1947 book about Goring and other Nazi defendants (“22 Cells in Nuremberg“), committed suicide in 1958. (He was an alcoholic, but only 45.) Kelley used the same method that Goring used to kill himself in his cell — cyanide. And what does this odd, grotesque fact have to do with Goring or anti-Semitic Nazis or anything along these lines?
Note #7: Every week I willingly, devotionally submit and suffer through movies like Nuremberg. I go to certain films with a reasonable expectation that they will instill a sense of being trapped, existential ennui, feelings of melancholy and even depression, etc.