Posted on 12/28/2002 5:55:07 PM PST by RCW2001
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
ecause Menno Meyjes's film "Max" presents a humanized portrait of the young Adolf Hitler as a desperately ambitious young painter, it has been prejudged in some quarters as an inappropriately sympathetic apologia for one of history's monsters. But as the film observes the edgy relationship of Hitler (Noah Taylor) and Max Rothman (John Cusack), the warmly solicitous (and fictional) German-Jewish art dealer who advises him, it presents a fascinating and psychologically credible interpretation of events that may have been crucial to that monster's formation.
The movie has the temerity to imply that had Hitler found a patron, his life might have taken an entirely different turn.
Make no mistake: the 30-year-old Hitler imagined by the film is a thoroughly disagreeable creep. As he skulks through the movie, radiating a clenched, clammy phosphorescence, he could be described (in therapeutic terms) as a humorless, obsessive-compulsive rageaholic with zero tolerance for frustration. He is the sort of killjoy who, when attending a social gathering, would be deemed intriguing for the first 20 minutes but quickly would wear out his welcome with his haranguing intensity, rigid certitude and lack of social grace.
Hitler had charisma, to be sure. But the movie imagines that at this point in his life it manifested itself only on a podium. The scary later scenes, which portray Hitler as a ranting backroom orator, suggest how in a public forum his toxic mixture of high-pitched fury and egomania could strike a spark and ignite mob violence.
When we first meet Hitler, he is an impoverished, shiftless war veteran listlessly hanging around with his fellow soldiers and grumbling about Germany's loss of World War I and the country's humiliation by the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler's anti-Semitism has already coalesced into a bogus theory of racial purity. He professes a grudging admiration for Jewish clannishness, which he believes has given Jews superior intelligence. But that respect is outweighed by an icy strain of paranoid loathing for what he perceives as the contaminating Jewish influence on other cultures.
A fellow soldier, Mayr (Ulrich Thomsen), an army propaganda officer, recognizes Hitler's potential as a forceful public speaker and encourages him to speak out in beer halls. The film subtly portrays the influences of Mayr and Rothman as a tug of war for Hitler's soul.
All that said, "Max" doesn't pretend to be an accurate biography of the youthful Hitler. It is finally more concerned with the fictional Rothman than with his sour, frustrated sometime protégé. The art dealer, himself a painter until he lost his right arm in the war, is an optimistic bon vivant with a wife (Molly Parker), two children and a lover (Leelee Sobieski). This skeptical, warmhearted aesthete is well on his way to becoming a mover and shaker in an art world that the film imagines as an elegant round-the-clock party floating above the misery and desolation of postwar Munich.
"Max," which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, is at its weakest when observing Rothman's chaotic personal life. The scenes with him and his wife and family are frustratingly elliptical and lack emotional focus. But when it is reflecting on art and society, the movie comes alive. Modern art is the aesthetic and spiritual beacon that illuminates this world and points a way toward a thrilling but vague utopian future, and the rising stars circulating through this glamorous demimonde include Max Ernst and George Grosz.
The film has extravagantly stylized visual imagination. Rothman runs a gallery, eccentrically festooned with art, that resembles a giant, casually decorated warehouse. "Max" was filmed in Budapest. (Contemporary Munich looked too sleekly modern.) And the fictional gallery is actually a former locomotive factory 300 yards long. The setting's cavernous, pre-Bauhaus austerity mingles with a shadowy, voluptuous German Expressionist palette to create the overall impression of a monumental, sprawling, timeless Bohemia in which life and art have wound together into a dizzying Modernist dreamland.
This slightly eerie ambience deepens Max and Hitler's continuing aesthetic debates as Max repeatedly goads Hitler to dig into his own psyche and slap his pain and confusion onto his canvases. But the prim young painter, who clings to classical ideals of form and beauty, is too guarded and repressed to understand what Max is talking about. Max's artistic ideas are pungently embodied in a performance piece, involving a giant meat grinder, that epitomizes the kind of art that the Nazis would later condemn as decadent.
Despite his doubts about Hitler, Rothman generously agrees to take some of his paintings on consignment, but the potential customers he locates end up choosing Ernst over Hitler.
The debates between Rothman and Hitler culminate with the movie's conceptual coup, in which Hitler comes up with the iconography of National Socialism, including the swastika, and proudly presents it to Rothman, who is impressed enough to proclaim that Hitler has made his crucial breakthrough. It's a novel idea: Nazism as the art project of a failed painter. Because that iconography has yet to be attached to a political and social movement, Max sees it only as a fantastically inventive work of kitsch, a grand theme park of the imagination that today might be labeled Hitlerworld.
In its eccentric way, the movie is rather like a theme park. It is a historical fantasy connecting fact and wild supposition into a provocative work of fiction that poses ticklish questions about art and society. And the inability of Rothman, the quintessence of European urbanity and intellectual sophistication, to grasp the implications of Hitlerworld points ominously toward the future.
For Mr. Cusack the role of Max is a huge, successful leap from playing the bluff nerdy guy next door to a jovial cosmopolite, and in making that leap he doesn't sacrifice his characteristic charm and generosity. As the future Führer, Mr. Taylor masters the perilous challenge of depicting a recognizable forerunner to the Hitler we know and despise while keeping that interpretation from turning into a cartoon.
"Max" may be a brashly inventive film, but it is not an offensive one.
"Max" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for sexual situations and one scene of violence.
MAX
Written and directed by Menno Meyjes; director of photography, Lajos Koltai; edited by Chris Wyatt; music by Dan Jones; production designer, Ben Van Os; produced by Andras Hamori; released by Lions Gate Films. At the Angelika Film Center, Mercer and Houston Streets, Greenwich Village. Running time: 108 minutes. This film is rated R.
WITH: John Cusack (Max Rothman), Noah Taylor (Adolf Hitler), Leelee Sobieski (Liselore Von Peltz), Molly Parker (Nina Rothman) and Ulrich Thomsen (Captain Mayr).
I have a book of Hitler's artwork. He seemed quite talented to me, though his works were mostly of buildings. Quite accurate depictions yet distinctly lacking in action and life. Hitler seemed to be a classicist with unfortunate timing to be hawking his works in an avant garde age that shunned the ways and tastes of the past.
I thoroughly believe that had Hitler become a successful artist, he would have emerged as the Barbara Streisand of the 1920's and 30's, whose constant railings against the government policies would have amused millions and been dismissed without a second thought.
Confused young war veteran fighting with various inner demons and the defeat of his country is reaching for some truth and beauty through painting.
The patron (Max) rejects this search, prodding Hitler to express his inner pain, providing such examples as a meat grinder (which has often been used as a metaphor for the totalitarian state) as part of a performance piece for Hitler to emulate. Tragically, Hitler follows Max's lead and creates the iconography of Nazism...
...and eventually, as we all should know, leads one of the most homicidal performance art pieces ever, which probably ground up Max as well.
What tug of war, Mayr is trying to form Hitler into a hater and Rothman is counseling Hitler into letting out his inner pain.
Why would I want to be a God?
What a load.
Too bad they didn't have a chill pill.
He was skilled at producing representations of existing structures, but there is no evidence he had any skill in creating anything new.
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