Max (2002)

I just stumbled upon this film on HBO and must admit that I was taken a bit aback at first, seeing a portrayal of Adolf Hitler (Noah Taylor) as a post-WWI struggling artist and his relationship with a (Jewish!) art dealer (John Cusack). It's difficult for most of us to separate the monster from the strange, brooding and maladjusted but also rather bright human being who would become that monster. But I found myself rather absorbed. There are plenty of 'liberties' taken with actual history, but it IS a film after all...Rothman's anti-war 'performance art' piece with the meat grinder was brilliant I thought, and the roiling art scene of post-war Germany (Dada and Surrealism were just getting off the ground) was portrayed pretty well. John Cusack is very good as usual, and Noah Taylor's performance as the mediocre artist turning politician is riveting... and disturbing.I agree with Dr. Aaron's comments... As I said, there are some inaccuracies, but I applaud the effort. It took some guts to make this film. People should watch it, as there are some parallels with our current time that should be carefully... noted. You know what they say about those who forget history...

An excellent project in which Cusack excels, as he almost always does. It catches the sadness and sense of the absurd in the German art scene after the war, although it sometimes looks and feels more like Berlin than Munchen. (Wasn't George Grotz in Berlin in 1918, or was that deliberate artistic license?) In any case, the deeply melancholy undercurrent, combined with the lovely interiors, seems right to me.The film goes seriously off the rails toward the end, and a few central ideas don't work. The idea that modernism included the possibility of German fascism (and specifically the horror of Hitler and the Nazis) as a matter of course is highly subjective. The worst scene is the speech in which Hitler rails at the Jews in a hall, which came across as robotic and unconvincing. Political agitation at that time was a brawling, violent thing, in which the message of anti-Semitic German nationalists was communicated through beating people up as much as through any words. There was an intense atmosphere of systematic violence at those meetings, at least in the early days. Hitler's speech doesn't come close to capturing that, and misses the fact that whereas the far right had been anti-Semitic for a long time, most mainstream Germans had not been exposed to it that much, and thought it rather operatic and not particularly appealing as a political message. They wanted to hear other things, especially about the humiliation of Germany by the Great Powers, with anti-Semitism gaining momentum later in the 1920s. Many people will say that it's wrong to humanize Hitler and the Nazis, but that's wrong. People who make that objection want to believe that there is no Nazi in themselves, that they are completely without the capacity to commit evil. But the Nazi is in all of us, including some Jews who have internalized the aggression once directed against them. To defeat the Nazi that exists in everybody, you have to know that it's there inside you. Only if you know it's there, can you chose not to act on it.This film could be usefully viewed along with two excellent German films about Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, a group of idealistic young students and soldiers in Munchen (Munich) that in 1943 tried to overthrow Hitler and paid with their lives. Both movies are available in DVD on Amazon.com with subtitles. Different period, same moral and existential challenges.

MAX is certainly an interesting, intriguing and original movie. It somehow slips into caricature and grotesques towards its end; yet the remarkable cast, the original conception make it noteworthy. There's also the alibi that history itself slept into grotesques and caricature, and Meyjes' movie only follows that movement. The 'two beautiful women' scene ,when Max tries to bring Adolf into the women's company, is perhaps the best in the movie.I mean some scenes are so intriguingly made, with finesse and gradation and tact, that the ulterior fall into caricature looks like slapdash, like an expedient. The movie contaminates itself with some phony Expressionism, and this spoils the previous commitment.The ultra—sexy Leelee Sobieski plays Max's mistress.In better times, this child could have been another Mrs. Sandrelli. Her glamor is genuine. She has extremely beautiful hands.

Supremely directed and well acted, like Nic Roeg's Insignificance before it this toys with history and consequence using a big brush flecked with realism. It only occasionally skirts the shores of being ham fisted. The story underplays the social to suggest Hitler's main thrust was aesthetic That his rhetoric was some form of punk performance art playing to the galleries. This is probably not something we can agree with the film makers on. But that they indulge in a dialogue with us at all instead of barracking us, and that that dialogue is so intelligent and thought provoking, means the film is to be greatly applauded.