"Nuremberg" is a Casting Disaster
There are things in this world we have collectively decided require a demonstration of ability to pursue. Doctors need a medical license. Lawyers have to pass the bar exam. We all take a driver’s test to operate a motor vehicle. All of these are dangerous for the unqualified, so we have systems in place to vet out people who have no idea what they are doing.
On the other hand, anyone is perfectly free to make a movie about World War II. There are no laws against it. I could dress one of my cats up as Winston Churchill and the other as Mussolini and shoot my own period piece on an iPhone, and no one could stop me. However, the viewers of this hypothetical movie would spend the entire runtime thinking “Wow, they really dressed a cat up as a fascist dictator.”
This is not entirely dissimilar from the experience of spending 2.5 hours watching Australian actor Russell Crowe play Hitler’s second-in-command Hermann Göring in the new movie “Nuremberg.” It doesn’t matter how good Crowe’s German accent is, just like it doesn’t matter how well my cat speaks Italian - the casting is a distraction.
“Nuremberg” is of course about the international tribunal and prosecution of the surviving Nazi high command for war crimes in the immediate aftermath of WW2 - seemingly compelling fodder for a major motion picture. Unfortunately, and deliberately hidden in the marketing of the film, this is barely about the trial. In fact, the lead of this movie is not Crowe, but Rami Malek, playing a psychiatrist tasked with keeping these Nazis from killing themselves while in custody. The trial is a small fraction of the movie’s runtime, and we don’t get there until well over an hour into the film.
This movie fails far beyond the casting. It’s a mess, with a tone all over the place. I appreciate a movie about such important subject matter trying to have a sense of humor in the first half, but it’s going to be a little jarring when you then cut to extended, real footage from the liberation of concentration camps. I respect what this movie is trying to say, remind us of, and warn us about, but somebody should’ve checked this director’s license.
“Nuremberg” is out in theaters on Friday, November 7th.
Rating: 4/10
