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"Nuremberg" feels old-fashioned, but that's not a knock on it.
It's not even just that the movie, based on a nonfiction book by Minneapolis writer Jack El-Hai called "The Nazi and the Psychiatrist," takes place shortly after World War II (El-Hai is an executive producer of the film). It's also that it's mostly a courtroom drama along the lines of 1961 drama "Judgment at Nuremberg," which covers some of the same territory. And that it boils down to a battle between good and evil. And that most of it takes place in a couple of rooms. And that it's extremely dialogue-heavy.
Here are five things you can expect when the movie opens Friday:
The West (Germany) Wing
The dialogue has a quick, sarcastic, Aaron Sorkin-y ring to it, with an ironic sense of humor that feels more contemporary than the movie's time period, the 1940s, would suggest. There aren't many of the trademarked walk-and-talks from Sorkin's "The West Wing" since the characters are mostly seated in conference rooms or jail cells, but James Vanderbilt's script is snappier than you'd expect a Holocaust war crimes-themed movie to be.
Battle of Oscar titans
Best actor winners play both leads. Russell Crowe (who won his Oscar for "Gladiator") plays Nazi leader Hermann Göring, who -- along with a handful of Nazi officials -- is on trial for his life in Nuremberg. Rami Malek (who won for playing another real-life character, Freddie Mercury, in "Bohemian Rhapsody") plays psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who is charged with interviewing Göring in prison. The two develop a respectful bond until Kelley, confronted with evidence of Göring's crimes (potential audiences will want to know there is a lot of documentary footage from death camps), cracks. Kelley's idealism is tested by the circumstances and, whereas Crowe plays his character as cocky and even witty, Malek's Kelley feels somewhat naive and pathetic. Kelley's the good guy but Vanderbilt makes him, at least on the surface, the less appealing character, to demonstrate that evil isn't always immediately evident.
And then this happened
One other irony of Vanderbilt's screenplay is that it shines brightest in the kinds of moments that usually drag a movie down. Following El-Hai's book pretty faithfully, it opens with surprisingly graceful exposition. The early scenes are the kind that, in lesser hands, can feel like the characters on-screen are talking to us to fill us in on what we need to know, rather than talking to each other. Vanderbilt's script gets us up to speed quickly and entertainingly.
Understanding the horror
Audiences can decide for themselves whether there are contemporary parallels to events of the Nazi era, when fascists came to power while most citizens did nothing to protest. But it's clear Vanderbilt wants us to be thinking about the present as he depicts the past. He also argues that what makes Göring's behavior especially horrifying is that he was a person with a wife, a child and (for reasons Kelley can't uncover) a serious lack of empathy. He was, in other words, not a monster.
The psychiatrist vs. the Nazi
The meat of the movie is in a question Crowe asks Malek about his fellow Nazis: "Will you even acknowledge we were human?" Kelley's argument, which an ironic postscript tells us he continued to make to the end of his life, is that we must try to understand evil if we want to prevent it from happening again.
MPA rating: PG-13 (for violent content involving the Holocaust, strong disturbing images, suicide, some language, smoking and brief drug content)