Hitler Before the Führer

New York Times ^

[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).

[weegee]

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.

This rings somewhat hollow though. Dominique de Menil was a big patron of Max Ernst even though she and her husband were not initially fans of his work. As a result, they commissioned a portrait of Dominique. Patrons can be guided to sponsor artists by the art brokers and artists can compromise their own designs to appease a customer.

There is a portrait of the young Dominique de Menil painted by surrealist Max Ernst around 1934. The painting shows just her head, in three-quarter profile. Her short blond hair waves around her ears, her skin is pale and unlined, her eyes are focused on the distance, and an enigmatic smile plays about her small mouth. The head floats on a strange orange, red, and deep blue background, and ambiguous curled shapes hover around it; they look like edges of seashells or shards of crockery.

At the time the portrait was painted, Dominique de Menil was in her mid-twenties and newly married. She and John lived in an apartment in Paris. They were by no means art collectors; they were simply trying to decorate a large, empty wall in their dining room when a friend suggested that they ask Max Ernst to paint a mural for them. "We were told he did wonderful birds," she recalls. "When I saw the kinds of birds this fellow did, I hated them. But since he was expecting something from us, we suggested he paint a portrait of me. "

Mrs. de Menil sat for Ernst several times in his studio and later went to see the results. "I did not like the painting at all," she says. "I thought I looked very stiff." She left instructions for it to be delivered; when many months passed and the portrait did not arrive, she wasn't sorry.

(from Texas Monthly archive:What I Admire I Must Possess)

By the way, today the Menil Collection houses one of the largest private collections of Max Ernst paintings and statues (along with a very large collection of paintings by Rene Magritte, among others). There is more to the story on the "portrait". Decades later it did make its way back to her and is sometimes on exhibit at the museum.

As to Max Ernst, he had spent WWI in the trenches fighting a war he did not support. He painted while in the trenches to take his mind off the war.

Not all frustrated artists or combatants vent their anguish violently.

[weegee]

Life would be quiet different today under a slightly different scenario.

Without German rocket/missle science, we might not have gone to the moon (also with the absence of a boast to challenge Russian space technology). Rockets would have probably come around at some point. Consider technologies like radar, jet airliners, satellites.

Japanese Imperial agression may have still occurred.

Communist/socialist ideologies may have overrun the globe.

Would the global depression have occurred/been so bad?

America and its place in the world would have been different in the absence of 2 world wars.

[ExpandNATO]

Postmodernism and postmodernists' lack of "black and white"/"good and evil" ended that day although they've fallen back into their old habits.

It should have ended that day. And if man was a rational being it would have, but man is a creature of habit and it takes conscious, continuous effort to change a habit, even if it is a fatal one.

[pepsionice]

The Japanese agession was a guaranteed thing. WW 1 had little effect on Japanese history from 1918 on. Japan would have eventually became the same Japan that we saw in 1942. The one slight difference might have been a delay of five to ten years before a Pearl Harbor type event. The Japanese navy would have been a major force by 1948 and the US would have continued its cost savings by managing a small navy. Japan could have easily won control of the entire Pacific, even Australia and New Zealand.