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Max
Directed by Menno Meyjes
Starring John Cusack and Noah Taylor
Certificate 15, 106 minutes
Review first published on fish.co.uk, August 2003.
Would you if you could, asks the old ethical conundrum, go
back in time and kill the young Hitler? Max offers a more
humane alternative - try to persuade him to abandon politics
and stick to his famously abortive painting
career.
The eponymous Max Rothman is not a time traveller or ethicist, he's just a Jewish art dealer who fought beside Corporal Hitler in World War II. He offers to promote him, if he can come up with something more modern and powerful. Rothman lost an arm at Ypres, but retains a wealthy family and good humour. Hitler returns to nothing but his own anger and betrayal - which Rothman urges him to channel into his work instead of his personality. Half of him is disgusted by modern art (as by smoking, womanising, and everything else Rothman stands for), but if he could get some paintings done and sold, he might be converted.
The film is both a personal story of two men, and a historical one, weaving together the birth of two great and opposing 20th-century movements: modernism and fascism. It is intelligent approach to a good idea, but leaves you thinking just how much more it could have been.
Cusack is as watchable as ever and Noah Taylor is excellent as young Adolf, perfectly recognizable as the Führer in embryo - even without the tash or a screaming rant till the last 40 mins - and yet a normal, three-dimensional human being, not an icon of evil.
The film lacks the sense of menace it is crying out for considering we know what Herr Hitler will be doing 20 years hence. One exception is the memorable cut where Hitler abandons the paint Rothman has bought him, and turns to his political writing - and suddenly, at home Rothman is being playfully stabbed by his son's wooden sword.
What we really miss though is a revelation of what would turn a resentful war veteran into a mass murderer. The script highlights his repression. He doesn't smoke, drink, eat meat, or take caffeine. He is sexually introverted and dislikes vulgarity. But then the same goes for hundreds of other people who just settle down to become deacons in their local church rather than invading Poland.
Perhaps because the filmmakers are (commendably) so focussed on his humanity, we get little sense of the rage of hatred that came to drive him, or where it arose from. We're told that things would have been better if there had been more sex and painting in Hitler's life, we're shown his poverty and resentment, but still the sum just doesn't add up. Well, it was ambitious maths.
The other rather facile contention of the film is that painting is better than politics. Like Adam and Eve in the garden, Hitler has to choose between the paradise of cubism and rotten apple of propaganda. "What would you rather do?" Rothman challenges him. "Change the way people see, or the way they pay taxes?"
I'm not much of a political animal myself, but even I raised an eyebrow at this. We are asked to lament that Hitler channelled his sense of dissatisfaction with the way things are into politics, when it would have been so much more positive and healthy to express himself in oils. Well, in the case of Hitler himself, knowing what we know, yes, of course. But as a general principle? How about if Martin Luther King had decided to sing spirituals instead of boycotting Montgomery buses? "Art + Politics = Power" say the movie posters. But we need good guys to make politics their artform too.
