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.
Hitler is an aspiring artist with nothing else going for him. He has returned from the war bitter and alone, and with a sense of gloom that is magnified once the Versailles Treaty has been signed. He is small-minded, jealous and desperate, and Max Rothman is one of the few people willing to support his artistic ambitions.
Out of financial need and general aimlessness, however, Hitler takes on a small job as an education officer, giving spittle-flecked speeches about the need for purity of race. Max's friends are horrified by Hitler's speeches, but Max laughs them off as mostly intellectually embarrassing.
Hitler, a lousy artist, becomes convinced that politics is the new art, and creates drawings of a brave new Germany to show to Max. It is agreed that, at last, Corporal Hitler has created something on paper that Max's gallery can show.
But something happens. Max doesn't show up at a decisive meeting. Hitler's career path is altered.
Max, which also stars Molly Parker and Leelee Sobieski, is a fascinating fiction. The performances by Cusack and Taylor are absolutely wonderful. Best of all, filmmaker Menno Meyjes manages to convey volumes of history in the small details of each character's daily life and surroundings.
It may seem like heresy to suggest that Hitler was both weak and ambitious, a mouse of a person rather than a monster of history. But in putting a human face on Adolf Hitler, Max does not offer, in any way, a sympathetic portrayal of the man. Quite the opposite, in fact.
(This film is rated AA)
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