MRS GÖRING IS FAR TOO SYMPATHETIC: Nuremberg reviewed.
The first half is often comic. One fellow prisoner is Rudolf Hess (Andreas Pietschmann) who is feigning amnesia, and whose backstory is a farce. When Göring [Russell Crowe] and other Nazi leaders are subjected to Rorschach tests, it’s done for laughs. But the second half is the trial itself, where real footage from the concentration camps is shown. It’s so horrifying it makes everything else feel phoney. This is the moment when the penny finally drops for Kelley [Rami Malek] and he sees that Göring is a monster and not his pal. Well done.
It serves as a decent enough history lesson. And it’s watchable. The message? That evil is within us all*. But all the characters could have been sharper. Crowe, bursting from the seams of his Luftwaffe uniform, is at least physically mesmerising. But you may still need a Red Bull or two.
*Lionel Chetwynd, call your office!
Chetwynd is a longtime naturalized American citizen who was born in England and raised in Montreal. He’d remembered from Canadian regimental history that of the 4,400-odd Canadians sent to Dieppe, about 3,600 were killed. Although they knew it was basically a suicide mission, not one man failed to report for duty. Chetwynd asked one of the old soldiers in his regiment, Sgt. Gordon Betts, why.
“My generation had to figure out what we were ready to die for,” Chetwynd recalled Betts telling him. “You kids don’t even know what to live for.”
Many years later, when Chetwynd was a successful Hollywood writer specializing in historical dramas, he told the Dieppe story during a Malibu dinner party–as a sort of tribute to the men who died there so people could sit around debating politics at Malibu dinner parties. One of the guests was a network head who asked Chetwynd to come in and pitch the story.
“So I went in,” Chetwynd told me, “and someone there said, ‘So these bloodthirsty generals sent these men to a certain death?’
“And I said, ‘Well, they weren’t bloodthirsty; they wept. But how else were we to know how Hitler could be toppled from Europe?’ And she said, ‘Well, who’s the enemy?’ I said, ‘Hitler. The Nazis.’ And she said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. I mean, who’s the real enemy?’”
“It was the first time I realized,” Chetwynd continued, “that for many people evil such as Nazism can only be understood as a cipher for evil within ourselves. They’ve become so persuaded of the essential ugliness of our society and its military, that to tell a war story is to tell the story of evil people.”
That’s when Hollywood is telling story of the Allies, the good guys of WWII (unless you’re a devotee of Tucker Carlson). When Hollywood is telling the story of one of the leaders of the Nazi party, in that case, the “evil is within us all.” Probably doubly so for those who historically vote for men with an (R) after their names. Or as Matt Zoller Seitz “unexpectedly” writes at Roger Ebert.com, “At one point, a character tells us that it ‘happened here’ because ‘the people made it happen, because they didn’t stand up until it was too late.’ He’s talking about Germany, among other places.”