Wrenn Schmidt – Movie Musings

Terribly handled drama that accidentally deals a favourable hand to a leading Nazi

Director: James Vanderbilt

Cast: Rami Malek (Dr Douglas Kelley), Russell Crowe (Herman Göring), Leo Woodall (Sgt Howie Triest), Michael Shannon (Justice Robert Jackson), Richard E Grant (David Maxwell Fyfe), John Slattery (Colonel Burton C Andrus), Mark O’Brien (Colonel John Amen), Colin Hanks (Dr Gustave Gilbert), Wrenn Schmidt (Elsie Douglas), Lydia Peckham (Lila), Lotte Verbeek (Emmy Göring)

If one thing captures what a miserable failure James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg is it’s this: if Herman Göring rose from the bowels of whatever Hell he currently resides in and saw it, he’d probably freaking love it. The misguided history lesson has a political and moral message that is obscured and fudged, its points either lost or delivered with thudding obviousness. But the one thing it’s consistent in doing is presenting the most infamous Nuremberg defendant as a fiendishly clever Hannibal Lecter, multiple steps ahead of everyone, whom the film allows to fudge (without sufficient correction) his responsibility for the Holocaust and who goes down due to his loyalty to his lost leader. Ye Gods.

Vanderbilt’s film is an old-fashioned film that simultaneously gives a spotlight to the relationship between Göring (Russell Crowe) and psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) and attempts to tell the entire history of the set-up, planning, prosecution and judgement of one of the longest trials in history. It succeeds at neither of these things, and does so while cramming dry, exposition-heavy dialogue into its actors’ lips (the sort of speeches where people launch into lists of the Nuremberg Laws or the trial’s legal framework). Much of it is dramatically inert – at least those parts you’ll be able to see through the film’s impossibly murky camerawork (I expected the lights to shoot up in the courtroom in a standard ‘truth-bought-to-the-light’ cliché, but even here it’s hard to see).

The material around the trial set-up essentially takes a fascinating subject – the wrangling of four allies (three of whom didn’t really trust the fourth) to create a legal framework for an international tribunal never attempted before – and makes it dull as ditchwater. Michael Shannon does his best as Justice Jackson, architect of the trial, but the vast majority of his scenes are little more than exposition (his best is a meeting with Pius XII, whom he effectively blackmails into supporting the trial, in recompense for Pius’ lack of action against the Nazis). Richard E Grant adds a little flavour, even though this film’s whisky-from-a-teacup Maxwell Fyfe (in reality, a stern man in his 40s) feels more like Grant-101 than a real person.

While the trial is a drag, the rest is a farce. Rami Malek flails as Douglas Kelley, in a poorly written role. I suspect, based on the film’s final ham-fisted scene, the intention was to suggest Kelley got too close to Göring and bought a little of what he was selling until the scales fell from his eyes during the trial (and the Holocaust evidence). That Kelley would serve as a dark warning that even the brightest can get seduced by charismatic Nazis. This would have added real fire to the film’s closing vision of Kelley as a drunken Cassandra, desperately railing on US public radio that it could happen here. But clearly someone was worried positioning our hero as someone who admired Göring for a while was going to be hard for regular viewers to sympathise with.

Instead, we get a clumsy dance, where its repeatedly stressed Kelley is only getting close to Göring because he wants to exploit him for a best-selling book. That his sticking up for Göring (including giving credence to Göring’s argument that he couldn’t possibly know about the Holocaust, because that was Himmler’s department) and being nice to his wife and child was all part of this.

It then awkwardly tries to have this cake and eat it, by suggesting Kelley also realising the trial is about real people not just turning a buck. It spectacularly lacks the skill to pull this off. Even worse, it hilariously keeps providing evidence that Kelley is a terrible psychiatrist. Göring manipulates him with ease and, in the real low-point, we cut from Kelley blithely saying he spoke to previously-depressed prisoner Robert Ley and he seemed calm – straight to the aftermath of Ley’s grisly suicide.

This is as nothing to the film’s strange admiration for Göring. Not helped by Russell Crowe giving the film’s best performance, it feels like Vanderbilt never realises how quietly favourable the cards he gives Göring are. (It even actively absolves Göring of antisemitism, arguing he was just an opportunist supporting it for advancement.) He has all the best lines and dominates his scenes. The film draws attention to his fiendish cunning (allowing himself to be captured so he can manipulate the trial, hiding his ability to speak English etc.), shows him effortlessly running rings around everyone he talks to, weaning himself off a pills addiction through will alone… It wants the sort of Hans Gruber like villain who controls the whole trial from his cell.

It undersells small moments, such as Göring’s nervous reaction before, and complete denial after, the Holocaust film played in the trial. Even worse it gives Göring wiggle-room, unquestioned, to deny his responsibility for the Holocaust. Let’s not beat about the bush: Göring signed the order authorising it. In the real trial, his charisma butted up against the damning facts of his involvement from everything from petty art thefts, to murder of allied airmen, setting up the Gestapo and ordering the Holocaust. Nuremberg is brave enough to show Jackson’s real-life poor cross-examination of Göring – but allows Göring’s weasel words on a debatable mistranslation of his order on the Final Solution to go unexposed for the bollocks it was.

The film’s ‘gotcha’ moment in the trial is feeble, reduced down to Fyfe getting Göring to say he continued to support Hitler. This is played as the key moment that would turn Germany away from the Nazis, but surely was hardly off-putting to many in a country that had almost literally fought to the death for Hitler less than year earlier. Göring would call it loyalty – another thing he’d be thrilled the film showed him displaying.

It gets worse. A final shot of the executed Nazis’ bodies is in such staggeringly poor taste I almost can’t believe I saw it: laid out exactly like Holocaust victims, they are driven in the back of a van to be incinerated in a concentration camp. I can see Vanderbilt was going for “poetic justice” – but it’s awful. After that gut-punch, watching a drunken Kelley in a coda all-but-say ‘Watch out Trump’s-a-comin’ and he’s a Nazi!’ almost feels okay (except of course it’s awful in a different way, as subtle as every other point in the film).

Nuremberg is terrible. It’s at its best when it’s merely slow and boring. At its worst when it borderline admires Göring. If you want to watch this story, search out the 2000 mini-series Nuremberg with Alec Baldwin as Jackson and a (possibly) career-best Brian Cox as Göring (Cox, and the series, succeed in showing him with surface charm, smart, but full of vicious cruelty and staggering bombastic overconfidence). Don’t watch this.

Be afraid of looking in Jordan Peele’s puzzling but less enlightening horror suspense film

Director: Jordan Peele

Cast: Daniel Kaluuya (Otis Jnr “OJ” Haywood), Keke Palmer (Em Haywood), Steven Yeun (Ricky “Jupe” Park), Brandon Perea (Angel Torres), Michael Wincott (Antlers Holst), Wrenn Schmidt (Amber Park), Keith David (Otis Haywood Snr), Donna Mills (Bonnie Clayton)

Spoiler warning: Peele loves to keep ALL the plot details on the QT – so I discuss more than he would want, but hopefully not enough to spoil the plot.

Jordan Peele’s previous horror films brilliantly married up genuine chills with acute social commentary. Plot details have often been kept under wraps – after all half the joy of watching Get Out or Us the first time is working out what the hell is going on. Nope continues this trend, but for the first time I feel this is to the film’s detriment. I actually think Nope would be improved if you know going into it that this was Peele’s dark twist on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (with added body horror). Instead, Nope plays its enigmatic cards so close to its chest that it ends up never having a hand free to punch you in the guts.

Pensive and guarded Otis Jnr (Daniel Kaluuya) – known, unfortunately, as OJ – and his exuberant wanna-be-star sister Em Haywood (Keke Palmer) are trying (with differing levels of enthusiasm) to keep their father’s Hollywood horse handling business alive after his freak death from a coin falling from the sky (everyone assumes it fell from a plane). The business is struggling, with OJ forced to frequently sell their horses to their neighbour, a former child star turned ranch theme-park owner, Ricky (Steven Yeun). Their lives are altered however when they discover a huge UFO living in a cloud near their ranch, sucking up horses (and other animals) and spitting out any inorganic remains. Seeing this as their path to fortune (and in Em’s case fame) they try and capture the UFO on film.

Nope is all about our compulsive need to look. Nothing draws our eyes like spectacle – and what could be a bigger spectacle than a huge saucer in the sky that eats people? It doesn’t matter if we know we shouldn’t, our eyes are drawn up (now imagine if Peele had been able to call the film Up!). We want to be part of the big event, whether that’s seeing the latest blockbuster at the big screen or rubber-necking at a roadside accident. Nope hammers this point home, when it becomes clear you are only at danger from the saucer when you look directly at it. Spectacle literally kills!

This is all an inversion of the mid-West America that starred at the skies in wonder in Close Encounters. There the Aliens capped the film with a glorious light show with awe and wonder from the humans watching. Here the appearance in the sky is a prelude to sucking you up, digesting you and vomiting out blood and bits of clothing a few hours later. Despite this, Ricky tries to make an entertainment show out of the creature (something he, of course, learns to regret), and OJ and Em find little reason to re-think their attempts to capture the animal on screen.

Peele’s film takes a few light shots at social media culture. Of course our heroes’ first instinct is to reach for their phones (they are looking for that “Oprah shot” that will guarantee fame and fortune). OJ at least is largely motivated by the cash influx his struggling business needs – Em wants the fame. But the film still attacks the shallow “main event-ness” of social media, where having the best and most impressive thing to show off (for a few seconds) is the be-all-and-end-all.

Peele remains too fond of these characters to judge them too harshly. But he has no worries about taking shots at the fame-and-money hungry Ricky, or a TMZ reporter who arrives at the worst possible moment and dies begging to be handed his camera so he can record the moment. Arguably Ricky would have made a more interesting lead: a man chewed up and spat out by the fame machine and angling for a second chance, who thinks he’s way smarter than he actually is.

The film opens with a chilling shot of what we eventually discover was the bloody aftermath of the disastrous final filming day of Ricky’s sitcom from his childhood-acting days, Gordy’s Home. Gordy was a chimp living with an adopted family: until the chimp actor snapped in bloody fury. It sets up a sense of danger, but the plot never quite marries it up with the main themes of Nope. Parallels are thinly drawn with Ricky’s attempt to commercialise this infamous tragedy, but it feels forced: the whole section plays like a chilling short story inserted into the main narrative. And the film never explores in detail the lesson from this bloody tragedy, that we underestimate the dangers animals can pose (despite the film being littered with creatures).

Instead, Peele settles for a stately reveal of his plot. It takes almost an hour for the film’s true purpose to become clear, but it lacks the acute and darkly funny social commentary that made his previous films so fascinating while they took their time showing you their hand. Interesting points are made about how black people are (literally) whitewashed out of Hollywood’s history (the Haywoods claim to be descended from the black jockey featured in the first ever moving film made in America). But it’s a political point that sits awkwardly in a satire (about something else!), and Peele overstretches the opening without making the central mystery compelling enough.

There are, however, fine performances from the actors, Kaluuya’s shuffling physique – slightly over-weight, the troubles of the world weighing him down – is matched with his charismatically sceptical looks. Keke Palmer is engaging and funny as his slap-dash sister, and the warm family bond between these two works really well. It never quite makes sense that someone as publicity-averse as OJ would really want to become a social media sensation, but you can let it go.

There is lots of good stuff in Nope – it’s beautifully filmed and assembled and once it lets you in on its plans, it has a strong final act. But its social commentary isn’t quite sharp or thought-provoking enough – people are shallow and love spectacle and social media, who knew – and neither the mystery or the plot are quite compelling enough. It’s told with imagination and Peele has a fascinating and unique voice: but Nope isn’t much more than a solid story well told.