Max
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Movie Reviews of Max
Movie Review: New Interpretation of Hitler's Personality and Motives
Summary: 4 Stars
"Max" is an interesting albeit somewhat flawed work of historical fiction that explores the role of artistic frustration and failure in the personality of young Adolph Hitler. The film is essentially about the historical and psychological intersection of art and politics in young Adolph Hitler's thinking. Max, played by John Kusack, is a wealthy Jewish painter who has been demobilized from the German army at the end of the Great War after losing his right arm and with it his artistic career. Instead, Max becomes an art dealer in Munich and opens an avant-garde art gallery in an abandoned locomotive factory. There he meets a young war veteran with a portfolio named Adolph Hitler (Noah Taylor) whom he takes under his wing and whose talents he attempts to nurture. Hitler, at this point in the film is quirky fellow to say the least. Impoverished, unattractive, erratic, and prone to hateful speech acts, the young corporal Hitler makes a strange foil to the suave, humane, and worldly Max-and yet the friendship between the two is extremely believable.
At this point in his career, Hitler has just been recruited by the military to make speeches about Germany's betrayal and to spy on upstart organizations such as the newly formed National Socialist (NAZI) party that he will subsequently wind up leading. Yet from the very beginning, Hitler is neither a mad man nor an avowed anti-Semite. When subjected to the Jew hating declarations of his commanding officers young Hitler claims that they are overly emotional yet he never rejects them completely either. One might say that at this point in the film, Hitler is as latently anti-Semitic as most other Germans in 1918, but it is not yet the basis of his murderous ideology. For his part, Max knows that Hitler is crude and resentful toward Jews to say the least, but this does not bother him. In fact one of the most interesting aspects of this film is the manner in which each of these people is exposed to the other's world. Hitler attends Max's gallery openings and meets his acquaintances. For his part, Max accompanies some of his fellow war veterans to a public speaking engagement where his friend, Hitler, delivers a pathetic and blustery speech to a largely disinterested audience. When explaining his actions to Max later on, Hitler states that this is merely a form of income and that he is just dabbling in politics.
Each man gets what the other is about but something manages to hinge their friendship together, and that something is art. After examining Hitler's portfolio, Max acknowledges his technical skills but informs him that he is undeveloped as a painter and that he must dig deeper. Putting his money where his mouth is, Max buys some of Hitler's future works on consignment and urges him to paint what he feels. This naturally raises the question of what might have happened had Hitler made it as an artist, but this is NOT the central message of this film.
Throughout the film, young Hitler is torn by forces that almost seem to compete with each other for possession of his artistic soul. On the one side is Max, who is benign progressive, optimistic and eager to shatter the assumptions of the past. On the other side, are Hitler's military mentors who convince him that politics are his art form and that people are his canvas. Most importantly, they convince him that there can be no future that is not firmly rooted in the past and that the past, like the military, is sacred.
Hitler neither accepts nor rejects the ideas of either party but instead fuses them together. After numerous frustrating attempts to paint, Hitler finally takes Max's advice and "digs deeper". The result is a series of sketches that look like they could have come straight out of Leni Riefenstal's film, "Triumph of the Will".
Hitler shows his sketches of soldiers, stadiums, monuments, banners, and swastikas to Max who immediately understands their artistic significance and promises him a one man show in his gallery. Fascism, as Hitler envisions it, is an equation of art, politics, and power. While an unknowing Max views these sketches as simply another phase in Hitler's artistic development, they obviously bode something far more ominous. On the night that Max and Hitler are to meet and go over the particulars of his gallery opening, Hitler gives his first speech to the National Socialists. In contrast to his earlier filth and impoverishment, Hitler is now clad in a shiny leather jacket and speaking in a respectable hall where he delivers a riveting anti-Semitic speech that rouses the entire audience. His best medium, it seems, is the political arena and not the painter's canvas.
In the interview portion of the DVD, director/writer Menno Meyjes states that he wanted to explore Hitler from a new perspective. In this film, young Hitler is neither insane nor even much of an anti-Semite. Instead, he is a failed artist and an opportunist. The implication of the film's final speech is that Hitler's odious career isn't based on the passion of his beliefs, or even upon hatred but on opportunism and the urge to succeed.
While some parts of the film are a bit overdone (the avant-garde art and architecture is projected more than necessary) it has many subtle touches. At one point after a failed bout of the canvas, Hitler looks upon himself in the mirror and slowly begins to slick his hair to one side. It's an almost laughable gesture to an audience that knows that, yes, that WILL be your future hairstyle, but it's also an interesting message that this person is still searching for his identity. Similarly, when Hitler gives the film's final climactic speech his normally clean-shaven face begins to show some hints of growth. The trademark moustache like the trademark hairstyle is making its appearance. The icon is almost complete.
I recommend this film to anyone interested in studying Fascism or the relationship between art and politics. While Hitler is the most fascinating character in the film, it in no way excuses or makes apologies for him. Instead, the film isolates a specific period in Hitler's life and asks why he made the choices that he did. Was
it really so inevitable?
Movie Review: The Intimidation of Possibility
Summary: 4 Stars
"It doesn't have to be beautiful. It doesn't even have to be good. It just has to be true."
While "Max" is a historical movie, taking place in Germany after World War I, it shouldn't be viewed as a historical document. The movie has a much more powerful point to make about the nature of art and what the creation of art can come to mean to the creator. It's more of a "what-if" story, raising questions about what might have been had things turned a little differently, had chance played some different cards for a young man struggling to express himself -- a young man named Adolf Hitler.
Perhaps the most daring thing the film does is to actually treat the subject of Hitler without demonizing him, without casting him automatically as the monster. The film is not especially kind to Hitler -- in it he is portrayed as nervous, reactionary, arrogant, opinionated, prejudiced against Jews (though he repeatedly protests this) and not particularly intelligent (though not stupid either). However, he is also not shown as the pure evil many would associate him with. He doesn't kill puppies, he doesn't hurt anyone, and other than one memorable scene, he doesn't even get very violent at all. Through the film we see him trying to develop his expression along two lines: the visual arts, which he has struggled with since before his service in the war, and the art of politics, which is really the art of swaying public opinion. He goes back and forth between the two; as one seems to be succeeding, the other is left lagging for a while.
The performance of Noah Taylor as Hitler is really the standout role in the movie, but the other actors are also quite good. John Cusack plays the title role of Max, a former artist, now an art dealer due to the fact that he lost his right arm (his painting arm) in the war. Through the film, Max also struggles with expressing himself in different ways, and is frustrated several times. Max, however, seems more resigned to his life after the war, and Cusack plays the character with a subtlety and complexity that is remarkable. The lovely Molly Parker plays Max's wife, who is supportive of him, even when she knows he is having an affair. Leelee Sobieski plays Max's sometime lover, also supportive of Max, though in different ways.
But it is Taylor's performance that I keep returning to when I think of the movie. He played Hitler not as a monster, not as a simpleton, not even as an ideologue, but just as a man -- a frustrated, flawed man who had lots of ideas but didn't know what to do with them. At first, Hitler seems to fear the blank canvas; it's a feeling any artist knows well, the intimidation of possibility on an unmarked page. At one point, he paints a single tiny line...and then stops, uncertain of what to do next. Max repeatedly entreats Hitler to "go deeper" in his art, to explore his feelings and paint them. Finally, in a powerful scene, he does so: Hitler returns from an outing with some girls Max knows, angry at himself and at them, and now he can work. He slashes paint onto his canvas, mixing colors indiscriminately, hitting the canvas with the brush, grimacing, sweating, breathing hard...and then he stops, and looks at what he's done. A few moments later, he destroys it in rage. We never get to see what he painted, which makes you wonder all the more -- was this what might have been?
Of course, we know how this story ends. It's no spoiler to say that Hitler eventually abandons his visual art and devotes himself to his dark political visions of the future. But it's the way this happens -- more because of his own choices and limitations rather than anyone else's -- that makes the film so compelling. One is left with the impression that, had he made different choices, or had he devoted himself to the visual arts more fully, a great disaster could have been averted.
There's another way of looking at the film which is a little frightening, but no less valid for that. At one point, Hitler says that he "knows" he is destined to be a great artist, someone that will be remembered. As he turns more and more in the direction of fulfilling his political vision, as his strange visions of the future become his outlet, I began to wonder -- perhaps he was right. Some artists are remembered for their most offensive works, for the things that leave the deepest impression because they disgust. Hitler's final work was not beautiful, and it was far from good. But maybe, for him, it was what was true.
"Max" is a movie which engenders this kind of thought process. It is not a perfect movie, but it is a thoughtful, subtle movie -- worth seeing for anyone, but especially for those who are willing to consider the possibilities of art and of creation, and to see that the most infamous man in recent history was still just a man. In one way, it is comforting to think that Hitler had flaws just like anyone else, that he was human, that he wasn't larger than life. In another way, it is deeply troubling.
This is the essence of what "Max" is about -- we all start with a blank canvas. What we do with it, what happens in the process, and the consequences of our act of creation, all result from our own choices.
Movie Review: The frustrated artist Hitler looks for his "authentic voice"
Summary: 4 Stars
A standard question concerning ethics asks if you could go back in a time machine and have the chance to kill Adolf Hitler as a baby, would you do it? Another "what if?" concerning Hitler has to do with his attempts to be an artist. Hitler's artwork is rather cold and uninspiring, but it seems reasonable to speculate that if he had been a better artist he would not have turned to politics and the 20th century would have been completely different. Writer-director Menno Meyjes explores this idea in the 2002 film "Max," in which Adolf Hitler (Noah Taylor) is still living in military barracks in Munich as Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles and is trying to make a name as an artist. He shows his work to Max Rothman (John Cusack), a Jewish art dealer who lost an arm in the World War and who is consumed by the idea of the subversiveness of modern art. Hitler disparages such ideas, considering them "blood poisoning." Rothman and Hitler argue about art, both in terms of the futurist movement and Hitler's lack of an "authentic voice" in his own work.
Meanwhile, at the barracks of the decommissioned army, Hitler is folding laundry and being courted by Captain Mayr (Ulrich Thomsen), who is teaching a class on propaganda. Mayr is a historic figure and it is in his responses to Mayr and others in the barracks that Hitler is his most articulate and persuasive in dispensing his particular brand of venom.
The major fault I find in this film is that both the script and Taylor's performance play too quickly to the ranting Hitler. One of the great distortions of Hitler's legacy is that the black & white film footage of Hitler speaking comes from the climax of his speeches, when he has worked himself and his audience into frenzy. But Hitler always built to such a crescendo. He would show up late for speeches, making his audience wait in anticipation, and then stand there until the audience got quiet, and then would stand some more, building the drama. Then he would begin speaking softly, so that his audience strained to hear him. Hitler was a devastatingly effective public speaker and every time his oratory is reduced to rants and raves we have an incomplete and inadequate understanding of the monster.
What lies at the heart of the film is the idea that you either take the view that Hitler is a madman born in sulfur who wrecked havoc on the world or that he was a kind of hustler. Meyjes goes with the later view, presenting Hitler as a frustrated artist whose evil was rooted in that frustration and his inability to express himself. It is in his engagements with Rothman and Mayr that Hitler finds his "authentic voice," and comes to the fatal conclusion that politics will be his art and the German people his canvas.
"Max" ends the relationship between Rothman and Hitler on an ironic note, which is exactly what I expected. After all, by both his failure and his success with Hitler, Rothman is pushing Hitler towards the horrors of Nazi Germany, and his fate in the film symbolisms what is to come. Meyjes is not trying to tell a true story here; after all, Hitler had a handlebar mustache during this period after the war, but having Taylor play the future Fuhrer clean-shaven seems appropriate for this provocative story.
Of course this film is provocative; it should be. Reducing Hitler and the Nazis to being anti-Semitism misses the whole fascist dynamic of the struggle towards order that became the Cold War mentality. Meyjes takes the rather simplistic idea that if someone like Rothman had been a better patron to Hitler the artist that everything would have been different. But the script is so intelligent and the performances so compelling for the most part that we are willing to think along these lines at look at Hitler in a new light. This does not mean that we see him as being a better person, but rather than we better see him for what he was by considering how he became that way.
Movie Review: Adolf Hitler, or A Portrai of the Artist as a Young Man
Summary: 4 Stars
This enigmatic film title "Max" can be switched into "Adolf When He Was Young." The film is about a then failed young artist Adolf Hitler (Noah Taylor) and a fictional art dealer Max Rothman (John Cusack). Before he led the whole nation to another violent war, Hitler was trying to make it as a painter, but he failed in the entrance exams for the art school. Now, the film gives a question -- What if he saw his life in a different way?"Max" is set in 1918 in Munich, Germany. The post-war nation was suffering from the poverty and unemployment, and the distinction between those who have and those don't was too clear. It was the time of unrest for them, for many of the Germans considered their country was humiliated by unjust treaties. They are defeated, but still defiant.
Max Rothman is among the rich, dealing with avand-gard arts in the deserted factory. One day, he meets a struggling artist (so he thinks) Adolf Hilter at the backdoor of the building. He realizes that Hitler served in the previous war (Max lost one of his arms because of the war), and Max takes a pity on this miserably-clad small guy.
Then Hitler comes to him with his sketches, which Max thinks lacks the artist's inner voice. But we know Adolf was the son of the era, when everything was bleak and empty. And while Max encourages to find his own voice in the art, Adolf, constantly dissatisfied and angry, finds it in another quarter -- political speech.
The rest is history, as people say, and how the film ends does not matter. We know the outcome from the first. Still the film poses a question that is worth considering -- "Can he be anything else?" -- and more importantly, perhaps, "How could this small man with squeaking voice could move the whole nation in the tragic way?"
Molly Parker ("Kissed") appears as Max's wife, and Leelee Sobeski as his mistress. But their roles are not as big as the two leads, to whom "Max" belong exclusively.
Noah Tayler did an astounding job, making Hitler not a monster but someone who could have been different. He gives Hitler's slightly cartoonish images when we jeer at him, a deep meaning of its own -- frail, nervous, and eccentric -- all belong to the trait of some artists. But behind that pose of his self-importance, we see something very destructive.
Don't see the film for the story. See that as a character study against the background of the nihilistic world of the 1918 Germany. The photography (which reminds me of somber Eastern Europe films) capturing the grey city has its own power, like watching the hanging clouds before the rain. The cameraman Lajos Koltai's picture (actually set in Budapest) is itself a piece of art.
"Max" shows too many dialogues, and perhaps too introspective sometimes. But the film deserves our watching, and the theme is worth our considering. No wonder John Cusack did it without receiving money.
Movie Review: From Third-Rate Artist to Monster
Summary: 4 Stars
It starts in Germany in 1918. The army has lost; peace is about to be signed. Max Rothman (John Cusack), who lost an arm fighting, has set up a gallery in an old factory. He features modernist painters and sculptors who are just starting to break through, painters like Max Ernst and George Grosz. Max is skeptical of all the fine words about war and peace. He's smart, amusing, married with two kids, and has a mistress. After what he's been through in the war and sees in Germany around him..."There's no future in the future," he says. His Germany now is full of rampant poverty and unemployment, tremors of Socialist revolution, casual anti-Semitism among the priviledged, and Jewish scapegoating among many others. Max is Jewish.
He meets by chance a fellow who desperately wants to be a great painter, a corporal still in the army who happpened to be in Max's army unit. The painter's name is Adolph Hitler (Noah Taylor). Hitler is angry, resentful, clammy, thoroughly unlikeable. His sketches are competent but not exceptional. Max thinks there might be something in Hitler's work if Hitler would dig deep enough to put on canvas what he feels, not just what he sees.
Well, it didn't turn out that way, of course. Hitler has a third-rate talent for art, but a first-rate talent for inflaming people with the oratory of hate, of anti-Semitism, of blaming Jews, homosexuals, "mongrels" and foreigners for Germany's defeat. Since we know what happens historically, the interest and tension in the movie arises in the pull between art and politics. Hitler is not portrayed as a monster, but as a creepy, thoroughly unsympathetic creature who discovers that "politics is the new art!"
Cusack and Taylor give very strong performances. I think Cusask is an exceptional actor, and I was glad to see that he's starting to show his age. The lines around the mouth, the puffiness under the eyes give him much more dramatic weight. Noah Taylor is little short of amazing. He captures the terrible frustrations of a third rate artist who believes he's first rate...but can't deliver the goods. His Hitler oratory is loathsome and fascinating. I couldn't place the guy until I went to IMDb. He played the adolescent David Helfgott in Shine, another virtuoso performance.
This is a serious movie with some ascerbic moments that takes its time establishing the characters and setting up the premise. The ending packs a punch. The movie is well worth seeing.
The DVD transfer is first-rate.