Posted: 01/30/2003

Max

(2002)

by Darin Tretchikoff

Engaging and flawed.

One of history’s best-known clichés is the story of Adolf Hitler the art student. As a young man, Hitler spent the years before the First World War in Vienna in a futile attempt to become an artist. Hitler roamed the streets of Vienna, one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities at the time, portfolio in hand, visiting theatres and hoping to find work as a set designer. He lived in a cramped apartment, worked feverishly, and applied to Vienna’s Academy of Art. At first rejected, Hitler spent the next year improving his work only to be rejected again. (Hitler was, despite Max Rothman’s frequent observations in Max, a hackneyed artist, derivative to a fault and lacking in originality or stylistic maturity.)

So for the past 60 years or so it has become fashionable (and facile) to infer some connection between Hitler’s frustrated ambition as an artist and his emergence as one of the two or three most notorious monsters in human history. This alleged conjunction between Hitler the artist and Hitler the dictator during his Vienna days is where Max focuses its examination. Despite some clever dialogue and more than adequate acting and a set that feels like the early Weimer era, Max in the end fails to live up to the demands of telling a story about Adolf Hitler during a crucial period in his life.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t see Max. In fact, I recommend that you do so. But the premise of this cinematic vignette is both a coffee-house platitude (“Politics is the new art!”) and just tenuous enough that it never quite persuades us that it’s plausible.

So let’s just acknowledge the problem so we can get it out of the way before we examine what’s likeable about Max:

Adolf Hitler did not lead the world into its most destructive war ever because he didn’t get a gallery show.

Now, if you’ve seen Max and liked it, you may be thinking, “Hey, Tretchikoff! You’re grossly oversimplifying a nuanced treatment of the relationship between two young Germans and the new world they were confronted with!”

True, to a point. Yet every plot development in Max - including Hitler’s (Noah Taylor) stilted attempts at a creative breakthrough, Max Rothman’s (John Cusack) efforts to bring Hitler into a world of light, and the tension in Hitler’s barracks as his captain (Ulrich Thomsen) draws Hitler into politics and oratory - refers back to this central premise. Never mind Hitler’s festering psychosis and the dissolution of Germany’s future in 1918 as the country entered an upheaval the likes of which it had never known.

But if we can for the 106 minutes of this film put away these criticisms and forget that Hitler’s art struggle occurred not in Munich but in Vienna and not in 1918 but before the war, what we have left is an enjoyable film about two complex men and the demons that haunted and briefly united them.

Certainly, a treatment of this period in Hitler’s life is long overdue. The strategy of director and writer Menno Meyjes (who also wrote The Color Purple) is to show us a lonely, tortured man named Adolf who is trying to find himself. And God forbid any of us would want to identify with Adolf Hitler. But of course, we do. That’s the redeeming quality of this script and the sympathetic treatment by Meyjes as a director, as well as a convincing relationship thanks to actors Cusack and Taylor. Here we see Hitler the heroic veteran who was gassed in the trenches, Hitler the patriotic drifter, Hitler the almost-Bohemian artist. He really was all these things, and in this way, Max adds something valuable to the cinematic treatment of this man.

But we also see another Hitler - a demonic figure emerging from the duality of art and politics, diffidence and power. This is, I think, where Max fails. While these elements were present in Hitler’s persona (consider Hitler’s bond of trust with Albert Speer, his architect-soulmate, or take a look at his submissive handshake with Hindenburg after the Nazi Party’s stunning victory in 1933), the complexities of his psyche and Germany’s mythos make such a subtext little more than trite.

Nevertheless, there is plenty in Max to enjoy. Max Rothman’s life is intended to be a look into the Germany that could have been. Rothman lives in a house that has an older façade but is half modern, with Gerrit Rietveld chairs and avant-garde paintings. The opening shot of the movie takes us into Rothman’s gallery, which also symbolizes the cultural nexus of Germany in the 1920’s and 30’s. It is filled with the work of George Grosz and Max Ernst - a deeply unsettling place for a rigid traditionalist like Adolf Hitler. The conversations between Rothman and Hitler about these influences pulling and tugging German society are really about Germany’s—and Hitler’s—soul. And in this, Max can be a rewarding excursion. Max won’t be around for long, so see it and enjoy a movie that took some chances.

Darin Tretchikoff is an American writer living in Victoria, British Columbia.

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