Controversy has been swirling around the film Max since even before it was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall. The film is about a friendship between two German men between the great wars -- Max Rothman, an art dealer in Munich, and Adolf Hitler, a disillusioned soldier and struggling artist. Rarely has the banality of evil been so well illustrated, and the notion that the film somehow humanizes Hitler is the sort of misconception available only to those who have not seen the movie.

The year is 1918. John Cusack stars as Max, a sophisticated German Jew who has come back from World War I badly wounded and unable to paint. He owns a gallery where the work of painters such as George Grosz and Max Ernst is shown -- the sort of work, ironically, that will eventually be termed degenerate and banned from Hitler's Germany.
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