Review: In 'Nuremberg,' it's dueling Oscar winners on trial, felled by a too-timid approach

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Movies that depict the history of war criminals on trial will almost always be worth making and watching.These films are edifying (and cathartic) in a way that could almost be considered a public servic and that’s what works best in James Vanderbilt’s “Nuremberg,” about the international tribunal that tried the Nazi high command in the immediate wake of World War II.

It’s a drama that is well-intentioned and elucidating despite some missteps.For his second directorial effort, Vanderbilt, a journeyman writer best known for his “Zodiac” screenplay for David Fincher, adapts “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist” by Jack El-Hai, about the curious clinical relationship between Dr.Douglas Kelley, an Army psychiatrist, and former German Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring during the lead-up to the Nuremberg trials.The film is a two-hander shared by Oscar winners: a formidable Russell Crowe as Göring and a squirrely Rami Malek as Kelley.

At the end of the war, Kelley is summoned to an ad-hoc Nazi prison in Luxembourg to evaluate the Nazi commandants.Immediately, he’s intrigued at the thought of sampling so many flavors of narcissism.It becomes clear that the doctor has his own interests in mind with this unique task as well.

At one point while recording notes, in a moment of particularly on-the-nose screenwriting, Kelley verbalizes “Someone could write a book” and off he dashes to the library with his German interpreter, a baby-faced U.S.Army officer named Howie (Leo Woodall), in tow.

That book would eventually be published in 1947 as “22 Cells in Nuremberg,” a warning about the possibilities of Nazism in our own country, but no one wants to believe our neighbors can be Nazis until our neighbors are Nazis.One of the lessons of the Nuremberg trials — and of “Nuremberg” the film — is that Nazis are people too, with the lesson being that human beings are indeed ...