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Max seeks to humanize a dumpy Austrian despite the modern rhetoric that defines him
by Zak Weisfeld
In his recent State of the Union address, President Bush referred to the insidious phenomenon of "Hitlerism," which he lumped together with "militarism and communism" to complete the 20th century's great triptych of evil. And while it is not at all unlikely that the president's canny speechwriters chose the word "Hitlerism" merely to avoid distressing the presidential pronunciation with the difficult and hoity-toity sounding "fascism" or even more ungainly "tz" posed by the term "Nazism," neither would it surprise me that the Republicans, with their Orwellian penchant for re-branding, have decided that it better suits their policies to blame the man than the movement. It would surprise me even less if it worked.
Who can blame people for choosing the clarity of Hitlerism over muddled Nazism? Who can blame people (particularly Germans) for eschewing the human complexities of the Third Reich and the human complicity in the banal bureaucracy of the Final Solution? Wouldn't it be far better if it were really all the fault of a single, mythic, superhuman Evil? Of a paunchy Austrian named Adolph Hitler?
It would certainly sell better. Programs on the History Channel with the name "Hitler" in the title routinely garner the network a spike in their ratings. A quick search of Amazon.com returns 1,920 titles for Hitler (poor Stalin gets fewer than half with 815— no wonder "communism" was third on the president's list. And lest anyone have any doubts about the allure of evil over good, FDR gets a paltry 161.) From any pop cultural measurement, it's Hitler as the embodiment of evil in a landslide.
Which makes the new movie Max from writer/director Menno Meyjes such a welcome addition to the Hitler oeuvre. Max's charming, though controversial, conceit is that Hitler was a thwarted artist and that a successful exhibition of his work could have turned the monster into a master—or at least a modernist.
The title Max is for the character Max Rothmann, played by John Cusack. Rothmann is a German Jew from a good family who returns, one-armed, from the dismal horror of the trenches at Ypres to open an art gallery in an abandoned train station. The gallery is aggressive in its modernism—a showplace for the new art and new sensibilities that swept through Europe after the catastrophe of WWI. And so is Max. He dresses well, drinks too much, keeps a beautiful wife and a beautiful mistress, and seems to survive almost entirely on irony.
Max Rothmann is a role Cusack has apparently wanted to play for years. And it's easy to see why. His Max relies on the same soulfulness guarded by glibness that made Cusack a romantic icon of the late 1980s. Unfortunately, Cusack doesn't seem able to get beyond his own clichés. He makes Max an excellent foil to the raging, embittered young Hitler, but fails to make him come alive. Whenever the movie follows Max into his family or romantic life, it quickly loses its punch.
Luckily, there's Hitler. Even today, playing Hitler, especially a semi-sympathetic Hitler, takes balls. Who would have imagined the man for the role would be Noah Taylor? The delightful Australian kid who made his debut in the delightful Flirting turns in a towering performance as the ultimate angry young man. And Hitler had reason to be. Like thousands of other young Germans, he returned from the front to find himself in a broken country, burdened by a crippling peace agreement, hanging on the edge of anarchy. Taylor seems to conjure his Hitler out of this volatile stew. He plays him as a little man, obsessed with blood and purity and his own victimization. All quivering rage, spittle, and bad hair, Taylor plays Hitler as a man drowning, kept alive by unshakeable megalomania and an intrinsic understanding of the power of hate.
In the two men's scenes together, Max shows itself to be one of those rarest of cinematic beasts, the entertaining movie of ideas. The duel between modernism and the mythic past, between irony and sentiment, between anomie and rage played out by Hitler and Rothmann gives Max the energy and rhythm of a boxing match. In these scenes, Meyjes' touch is light. His dialogue is brisk and often funny, but hide from the horrific void creeping in around the edges of the movie—the implacable reality of WWII and the Holocaust.
But it's a rhythm Meyjes has trouble sustaining. When his two leads are apart, Max stumbles. His portrayal of Max's home life reveals little about the character. Worse is the fact that Hitler's barracks life is rendered only sketchily and the Faustian officer who spots Hitler's propagandistic talent is too Hollywood proto-Nazi to offer any real bite.
Meyjes' failings as a director are not enough to dismiss Max, however. For an open attempt to look at the time and place that gave birth to a man and a movement responsible for the slaughter of millions, Max is worth seeing.
February 6, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 6
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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