Ben O'Shea: Rusty Is In Career-Best Form Here

Ben O'Shea popped in to share his thoughts on the new Russell Crowe film Nuremberg  and according to Ben, Crowe is in career-best form. Directed by James Vanderbilt, based on Jack El-Hai’s 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist. The film follows U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) as he investigates the minds and monitors the mental states of Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) and other high-ranking Nazis ahead of the Nuremberg trials. Ben did mention it runs a bit long but was it worth the extra minutes? And what score did he give it? Tune in to find out.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Great per flick with Ben Good morning, bad, Good morning guys. Look,
I hate to bring the mood down, but we need
to talk about we need to talk about. It's okay
because this looks need to talk about. We need to
talk about World War two, Agazi Nazis. Yeah. So the

(00:22):
new Russell Crowe movie. This is one of his best
performances in a long time. Rusty is in career best
form here. Interesting kind of parallel to his first which
was also Yeah, where he played Nazi. Now he's playing
an actual Nazi. I guest feeling his character Hando from Robostomp,

(00:43):
but would have been very impressed with what he's doing.
That's disturbing. Yeah. So. So it's based on the true
story of the Nuremberg Trials, which happened after World War Two.
They Allies had captured the Nazi high command and they
didn't really know what to do with them. Should we
just execute them for their war crimes? And an American
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Robert Jackson, who in

(01:06):
the movie is played by the great Michael Shannon, he
believed that we can't just execute these guys will make
the martyrs. Instead, we need to put them in front
of a courtroom and use the law, hold them accountable,
make them explain themselves, and get justice that way, and
we'll make sure this never happens again. But the problem
was this had never been done before. There'd never been

(01:27):
this sort of international tribunal. There was no precedent in law,
no case law that they could really base their trial on.
So they had to set everything up from scratch. That
was kind of his role. And then in terms of
the Nazis themselves, you've got Russell Crowe, who was Herman Goring,
the reich Marshal Hitler's second command after Adolf Hitler committed

(01:49):
suicide just before the end of the war. Herman Goring
was he was the guy, he was the top guy.
He was in charge, and he surrendered to American troops
in Austria and basically willingly kind of, you know, gave
himself up to this process. He believed that he was
innocent of war crimes. His assertion was that he did
so many of them. He said, look, I was in

(02:11):
charge of the Luftwaffa, the Air Force. I didn't have
anything to do with the concentration camps. You know, that
was somebody else. That was him. La he was a
bad dude, nothing to do with me. And but the
Allies were worried that the Nazis were the high command,
were all going to commit suicide like Hitler. So they
brought in a psychiatrist, and this is a true story.
They brought in a psychiatrist from the army who in

(02:32):
the movies played by Rami Malik from Bohemian Rhapsody and
I Robot, and his job was to get inside the
heads of these high ranking Nazi officials, make sure they
didn't commit suicide if they looked like they were going,
to alert, alert the military in charge of their imprisonment,
and also kind of, you know, maybe get a sense
of how they were going to defend themselves and pass

(02:53):
that on to you know, the American lawyers to to
kind of, you know, tip the scales of justice in
the right direction kind of thing. And so Rami Malick
strikes up this in the end, it really becomes a
friendship with Herman Goring and watching Russell Crowe and Rami
kind of do these scenes, it really reminds me a
lot of Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins in Silence of

(03:15):
the Lambs, very very similar and according to all historical
reports Herman Goring was. He was very charming, a super intelligent,
and you know, he was a family man and all
of these kind of things. And Russell does a good
job of I kind of, I guess, showing all of
those contrasts, also very vague, ego drivenlative, all of those

(03:38):
things as well, and so it kind of, you know,
it goes through the process of setting up this trial,
the meetings that the psychiatrist had with him, because his
goal was to prove that there was something about the
Germans that made them different, something that made them evil,
and he was going to write a book about it,
and then we would know what to look out for
in the future. But of course, you know, in the
end he comes to the conclusion that really nothing made

(03:59):
them different. They were the same as everybody else. This
is just what happens if you don't stand up to
people doing evil things, which is where I guess the
parallels come to some of the things that we're seeing
in the world today, and the film is not very
subtle in drawing those parallels. And then there's there's a
there's a there's a lot of great cameos in this
John Slattery is in this film A Leo Woodle from

(04:20):
the most recent Bridget Jones is amazing as kind of
an American soldier who's a translator. He probably steals the show.
But Russell's great. Like this movie. You know, it just
would not be what it is if it wasn't for
Russell's performance before all right, well, don't play me off.
Now we don't take sizes. Everyone gets played off. How

(04:41):
many did it come out in time for awards seasons?
Are you giving it? Well, I'm going to give it.
It's not perfect, but I think Russell it really does
a great job. I'm going to give it three and
a half. Three and a half. And did it come
out in time for award season? I don't think it
has no, No, I don't think so. But it's I
think no. I think I think it will qualifying. I
think it will qualifying. But we'll see, we'll see. I'm

(05:03):
looking forward to seeing it because I think it's gonna
be very interesting, very interesting. A bit long, that's the
problem with it. We will give me thirty minutes shorter. Okay, okay,
thank you,