Dir. Menno Meyjes, 2003, US, 109 mins
Cast: John Cusack, Noah Taylor, Leelee Sobieski, Molly Parker
Choosing a 'controversial' subject on which to base a film is not necessarily a passport to interesting cinema, and sometimes the trick can backfire with a vengeance. But Max, which in the build-up to its UK release has been slowly creeping into the media as the film that 'humanised' Hitler by showing him as an angry young artist, did not disappoint.
In 1918 Munich with the air of a city that could just as easily be 50 years ago or yesterday, something first-time director Mennos Meyjes wanted to perceive, Max follows the life of Max Rothman (played by John Cusack, and very loosely based on Josef Neumann and Hitler's several other Jewish art dealers), a self-confident Jew from a wealthy family with a stylish home, a devoted wife (Molly Parker), two lovely children, and a mistress (Leelee Sobieski).
Max is a former soldier who came back from WWI without one of his arms and as an artist with only one hand, Max finds himself unable to paint, which leads him to start selling art in a revamped warehouse turned into a modern art temple. On the evening of an opening show of expressionist paintings, Max meets an inspired young artist named Adolf Hitler, a down and out war veteran, who approaches him with the hope that he'll consider showing his art in the gallery.
Max empathizes with veterans like Hitler who have few prospects in Germany's post-war depression, so he advances him some money against consignments and advises him, "Get out of politics. ... What would you rather do, change the way people see or how they pay their taxes?" They start an unlikely and somewhat thorny friendship amid the restlessness of a humiliated post-war Germany and the film veers off into a kind of artistic and philosophical spiral.
Dealing with a subject this taboo and difficult is brave, but the key is all about balance. Max does balance all of the issues of looking into a fictional account of someone as terrible as Hitler, but some may walk away feeling as if this is the kind of film that humanizes a monster. In some minds, Max does humanize Hitler, but not in a way that you could feel any sort of compassion for the man. It just makes you realize that while Hitler was a terrible individual who terrorized the world, he wasn't the devil - he was an awful human that had a terrible vision of what life was all about and this film seeks to illuminate the forces that make a despairing, desperate man cynically choose evil. It also puts a face to at least one person who might have suffered.
John Cusack: "I think the paradox is that we see this person as human, with certain desires, and to see him in that lights makes us uncomfortable. There hasn't been much controversy from people who have seen the movie because they see that the entire core of the film is on the side of Max and progress and humanism and the illusion, the insanity of racism. I mean, how can anyone come out of this film and not think that the man is a coward, a thief and a liar? If somebody came out pro Hitler then they didn't see the film that we made".
Rothman embodies two strands of European Jewry. A patriot who enlisted in the army, he represents those who thought of themselves as German (or Polish or Russian) -- and never imagined that they, as Jews, could be construed by political opportunists as enemies of the state.
There is not a single frame in Max that does not evoke the monstrosity of the Holocaust. From the opening shot of train tracks -- Rothman's gallery is located in an abandoned train depot -- to its shattering conclusion, it does not flinch from the horror of history and may have one of the most powerful scenes ever witnessed. Without giving a lot of the ending away, almost anyone will find it hard not to feel brutalized after watching the play of events in the last 10 minutes of the film.
The film's strongest point is that it questions the idea of destiny. "What if Hitler was able to successfully pursue an artistic career? What if he never discovered his voice and his ability to ramble on in explosive, fanatical rants? What if he was looking for someone to save him?" And naturally, we know how this film ends. We know where Hitler's fate lies. Yet Taylor's portrayal of the 20th century's most infamous villain still reaches to the audience, reminding us that once upon a time, Hitler was simply an angry young man who desperately wanted to become an artist. And as such, you can feel yourself wanting to warn this bizarre man to stick with drawing and art.
The other interesting level of Max lies in the creation of propaganda from art. Artistic and political theory mesh and clash, forming a whole new form of expression and communication. When Hitler begins to discover the power of words, he is torn between art and politics. It's still hard for us to grasp the scale and perversity of Hitler's artistic imagination and when Taylor growls at Cusack, "Politics is the new art, Rothman! I am the new avant-garde," it highlights the immense, strange reality.
Max sells mostly modern art and hates Adolf's conservative, traditional style. The future Fuhrer indulges in "no alcohol, no caffeine, no nicotine, no meat," and incidentally shows little interest in women. Max encourages the young man to express his obvious rage on canvas. He thinks Hitler might be great if he could channel his own war-vet rage into anti-conventional art and keeps exhorting Hitler to stop being lazy (as his real dealer did) and "go deeper" into his own soul, but Hitler's heart was a cavity. He had few true connections with humans (a loner as a kid) except as objects of manipulation.
The young Hitler is played by a scrawny, dishevelled, bilious Noah Taylor (of Shine fame), who makes every effort to look despicable. Taylor is frighteningly pervasive and captures a certain idea of what the man could have been like with some great dark humour.Noah Taylor: "I was interested in this portrait of Hitler because I think it's too convenient to view Hitler as a satanic figure who just appeared for no reason. Max is a particularly original view of Hitler because it's not your standard biopic historical drama - it's more about a relationship between two people, one of whom just happens to be Hitler. And what makes him truly
frightening in this is not that he's from another world or the devil or anything, it's that he's entirely human. You see him as one of many people dispossessed and left at the end of the War. And at the same time there can be no excuses or sympathy for the man. Although in any life there can befall misfortunes that others can relate to, it is clear that people make their own choices whether to behave well or badly".
Mennos Meyjes: "The biographer Ron Rosenbaum quotes Hitler's architect Albert Spper as saying 'If you want to understand Hitler, you have to understand he was an artist first.' This is what inspired me to write Max. The reality is that if you showed somebody the Hitler of 1918 and said in 15 years this man will be Chancellor of Germany and in 20 years he'll have set the world on fire, no one would have believed you. Because, at that time, he might have gone in a number of ways. He was the man everyone thought was a joke, a nerd, the guy who could not fit in. So where did his power come from? In the film we take the view that the root of his evil was his disappointment in his ability to express himself. He makes a decision in the end to focus his energy on anti-Semitic speeches, but knowing that he could have chosen a different path makes it far more powerful and meaningful. In the end, the roots of fascisms are always the same: Fear. Rage. Envy and frustration."
In the end, Max is a brilliant exploration of the human impulse for self-expression and the deviant, destructive path that extremely frustrated people choose -- with Jews frequently their target. What the film mourns and what powerful questions it raises appears to be that if only Hitlers artistic career worked out, could the greatest horror of the 20th century have been avoided?
Shizana Arshad
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