Review: Max (2002/I)
Dennis Schwartz
Chris Wyatt; music:Dan Jones; cast: John Cusack (Max Rothman), Noah Taylor
(Adolf Hitler), Molly Parker (Nina Rothman), Leelee Sobieski (Liselore Von
Peltz), Ulrich Thomsen (Captain Mayr), David Horovitch (Max's Father), Janet
Suzman (Max's Mother), Andrįs Stohl (NCO), Peter Capaldi (David Cohn), Kevin
McKidd (George Grosz); Runtime: 106; MPAA Rating: R; producer: Andras Hamori;
Lions Gate Films; 2002)
"Though everything might be literate and smart about the film, it never took off
and always seemed static."
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
A pushy arthouse film that tries hard to push a hypothetical question forward as
to what would have been if Hitler succeeded as an artist and thereby abstained
from politics. It's an interesting question, even if the answer can only be
assumed. Dutch-born director Menno Meyjes, a noted screenwriter of such films as
"The Color Purple", directs the first film he has written which centers on Adolf
Hitler's post-WWI years as a 30-year-old struggling artist in the Munich of
1918. Corporal Hitler is back home from the war as a medal winner of the Iron
Cross for fighting in the frontline trenches during the crushing German defeat
at the Battle of Ypres-- the turning point of the war. But returns home to find
he has nothing. There's no girlfriend, family, friends, career, money, or home
(he lived in the army barracks at the time of the Versailles Treaty). He's armed
only with his conviction that he's a great artist and that he's owed something
for his war experience. Hitler is made human, albeit, as a rather despicable and
hateful and humorless miscreant, but still a member of the human race with
personal yearnings. Meyjes explains how the Führer, an everyman German type, a
nobody, used his limited talent in the arts to propel himself into becoming a
first-class rabble-rouser and a propagandist under the tutelage of a
passionately hateful anti-Semitic Captain Mayr (Ulrich Thomsen). He's shown not
as the Antichrist many would like to believe is the real him, but as a pathetic
nerd and sickly rigid little man who was influenced by the times and found
strength in his hateful self to strike the right chord with the German people
who needed a scapegoat for their dire economic situation and emotional support
for their poor self-concept. He connected with the German people by blaming the
Jews for everthing that's wrong in Germany, as he was also propping the German
people up with his Aryan superman philosophy he articulated in emotional street
speeches.
The film felt all of these things: innovative, humorous, smug, limited in scope,
and stuck on its fictional account of the future madman. There are also a series
of art lectures delivered through the course of the film that were preachy--not
blending into the rhythm of the story--even though they were thought-provoking.
Max is a fictionalized portrait of a pre-political Hitler's love-hate
relationship with one-armed Jewish art dealer Max Rothman (John Cusack). In
fact, Max is a fictional composite of those Hitler may have met during this time
frame. Max got his wound in the war which prevented him from pursuing an art
career, but he returns to his wealthy bourgeois family of his medical doctor
father (David Horovitch) and his lovable stereotyped clutching Jewish mother
(Janet Suzman), and his lovely wife Nina (Molly Parker) and two lovely children,
and opens a successful art gallery selling at high prices the newest rage in
abstract art-- Max Ernst, Monet, and George Grosz paintings. He also has an
attractive German mistress Liselore Von Peltz (Leelee Sobieski), which makes
Hitler furious at how the German women are made into tramps.
Max meets the sickly and desperate Hitler (Noah Taylor) at his warehouse art
gallery when Hitler as a messenger delivers him paintings. The snippy and
unlikable Hitler brings along his art portfolio for Max to look at and talks
disdainfully of the abstract artists ruining the world with their debauchery.
For Hitler art is a matter of eternal values whereby each generation improves
the last generation and art expresses the nobility in man. The chain-smoking Max
calls for an art that is not limited by subject matter, but an art that reveals
the depth of the artist and offers that magical connection that raises the
viewer's greater instincts. The story builds in tension showing the futile
relationship between the Jewish art dealer and the Nazi as it finally dissolves
as violence rears its ugly head, with Hitler finding his art in politics and
power--which he calls the new art.
Though everything might be literate and smart about the film, it never took off
and always seemed static. As a lecture on art and a dissertation on a monster
being created by society, it was finely researched. But as a kinetic film
experience it lacked passion and drama. In its weakest moments it seems as if
John Cusack is not an actor playing Max but is really the successful and dapper
Hollywood actor John Cusack himself who meets a very good actor, Noah Taylor,
playing the author of Mein Kampf and the creator of the Holocaust, and Cusack
comes away disappointed that he couldn't make an artist out of the hopeless soul
he tried to mentor and befriend even as he ranted on against the Jews. "Max" was
just loaded with the possibilities of 'what if' things went in a different way.
Obviously, they didn't ... so even this interesting premise couldn't alone save
the film from being so cut and dry and so poorly executed.
REVIEWED ON 11/4/2002 GRADE: C +
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DENNIS SCHWARTZ
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