Max (2002)

DIRECTOR: Menno Meyjes

CAST: John Cusack, Noah Taylor, Ulrich Thomsen, Molly Parker, Leelee Sobieski, Peter Capaldi, Kevin McKidd

REVIEW:

The unimpressively—and somewhat misleadingly—titled Max, the directorial debut of Dutch writer-director Menno Meyjes, is speculative historical fiction postulating the unlikely friendship—of sorts—between a (fictional) Jewish art dealer and a young Adolf Hitler. To that end, Max is a sporadically intriguing but uneven debut that does a frustratingly lopsided job of partially squandering its potentially interesting subject matter with a banal script.

In 1918 Munich, shortly after the end of WWI with the defeated Germany in an economic depression and humiliated by the harsh Versailles Treaty peace terms, German-Jewish art dealer Max Rothman (John Cusack) has an idea. Despite losing an arm in the war that ended his own ambitions of being a painter, Max has been insulated from the worst of the post-war environment by his wealthy family, his wife (Molly Parker) and children, and his young mistress Liselore von Peltz (Leelee Sobieski) and hatches ambitions of opening an avant garde modernist art gallery. This brings him into a chance encounter with a penniless ex-soldier and starving artist named Adolf Hitler (Noah Taylor), who unlike the comfortable Max, came home to nothing after the war but is determined he is a budding great artist despite suffering from an inability to get his ideas out of his own tormented mind and onto the canvas. Max takes pity on the wretched lost soul despite his awareness of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, taking him under his wing and trying to foster his artistic career while encouraging him to dig deeper and find his inner voice. Meanwhile, Hitler is recruited by a right-wing Army officer, Captain Mayr (Ulrich Thomsen), to propagandize to crowds and sell the theory that Germany did not rightfully lose the war, but was “stabbed in the back” by enemies within, principally Communists and Jews. Max does his best to encourage Hitler to find a positive outlet, but whatever chance history had of taking a different course dries up as the troubled young man finds his true calling.

Max‘s premise—at times resembling a dark, twisted version of a “buddy movie”— is intriguing, but writer-director Meyjes (whose previous claim to fame was screenwriting The Color Purple and co-writing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with George Lucas) fails to use it to its full potential. Perhaps first-time director Meyjes was biting off more than he could chew, but his direction is bland apart from a couple moments of flair; Hitler is introduced with the camera swooping down on him from above while he stares rapturously up at a huge eagle statue, and the climax intercuts between Hitler delivering a frothy speech spewing anti-Semitic bile, and Max and family and friends at prayer in their synagogue. The biggest problem is the title character. Max is not only a fictional invention, but an uninteresting one; John Cusack’s performance is adequate, but the scenes of Max’s family life and dalliances with his young mistress, or his attempts to open his gallery while pontificating on art are banal and dull and make the Max-centric sections tedious to sit through (as indicated by the title, the central focus lies more with Max than Hitler). It’s hard for such a comparatively banal character to compete for our interest when the other main character is Adolf Hitler, and Hitler is inevitably more interesting than Max simply by virtue of being, well, Hitler. Additionally, the central friendship—sort of—between Max and Hitler at times strains credibility. We can buy that Hitler is willing to make an exception for Max in his anti-Semitism; he is after all a starving artist throwing himself on the mercy of a potential benefactor. It’s harder to see why someone like Max would go out of his way to befriend someone like Hitler, who is miserable company with no discernible sense of humor or social skills (Max tries to take him out on the town to meet some girls and loosen up, but Hitler leaves the girls bored and confused by monologuing about “blood purity”) and a penchant for launching into rabid anti-Semitic speeches, and generally never comes across like someone any normal person would want to spend two minutes with. Additionally, Meyjes’ script occasionally gets too cutesy for its own good, throwing out one-liners like “you’re a hard man to like, Hitler” that make one feel that the movie fancies itself wittier than it is.

When we get away from the uninteresting Max-centric tedium, there are interesting elements, although they’re mostly underexplored. After struggling with more conventional art, Hitler eventually “finds his true voice” as Max has been urging him to do, in the form of architectural sketches of designs for a revamped, grandiose, Roman-inspired Berlin (designs the real Hitler would later assign to his personal architect Albert Speer but were left forever unfinished) and meticulously-designed uniforms, along with ideas for a super highway that would become the Autobahn (the movie gets a few other historical details about Hitler right, including his rigid abstaining from meat and alcohol and the paradox of being a violent anti-Semite who is upset by cruelty to animals). The movie poses two intriguing questions: whether history might have taken a different course if Hitler had been steered instead into harmlessly becoming a successful artist, and whether Max is unintentionally encouraging Hitler to unleash the vision that will eventually wreak death and destruction. For his part, Hitler denies being anti-Semitic (though his penchant for lapsing into foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Semitic speeches makes this a questionable claim) and insists he grudgingly admires the Jews for their “blood purity” and believes the German people must do the same (in contrast to Hitler considering “Germans” and “Jews” mutually exclusive, the German-Jewish Max, despite being a cynic disillusioned with war, considers himself a patriotic German). Not until the bitterly ironic climax do the parallel Max/Hitler storylines intersect in a dramatically powerful way.

John Cusack’s performance is okay, but he has the thankless task of co-starring with someone who’s playing Adolf Hitler and therefore is inevitably going to steal the show away from him. Cusack apparently felt strongly enough about the material that he helped the low-budget movie get made by also serving as a producer and forfeiting a salary; it’s a bit of a shame that whatever passion Cusack might have personally felt toward the movie doesn’t come through in his dull character which is the weakest part of the movie. Young Australian actor Noah Taylor, gaunt, scrawny, and wild-eyed, imbues the fledgling Hitler with impassioned torment, although his sneering, snarling, Gollum-esque performance sometimes strays into being both overwrought and one-note (his climactic speech, rabidly spewing almost unintelligibly, does not convince us of his oratory skills despite ostensibly whipping the crowd into a frenzy). Of the supporting cast including Molly Parker as Max’s wife, Leelee Sobieski as his younger mistress, Peter Capaldi as his friend and Kevin McKidd as real-life boozy painter George Grosz, the only one to make an impression is Ulrich Thomsen as the smooth-talking Captain Mayr who recruits Hitler into right-wing propaganda, the “devil” on his shoulder in contrast to Max’s flawed “angel” (incidentally, Captain Karl Mayr was a real person, who had a strong hand in getting the fledgling Hitler’s career started but later turned against him and was eventually executed).

At the bottom line, Max‘s premise is both interesting and audacious—and generated quite a bit of controversy, including scathing reviews from some who embarrassed themselves by later admitting they hadn’t even seen the film—but Meyjes fails to use it to its full advantage. In the end, the amount of controversy whipped up around the movie feels unwarranted and only giving it more attention than it would have attracted on its own. Max is sporadically intriguing, but underwhelms with too much frustratingly uneven banality to say whatever it’s trying to say.

* * 1/2