Max [DVD] [2003]

It starts in Germany in 1918. The army has lost; peace is about to be signed. Max Rothman (John Cusack), who lost an arm fighting, has set up a gallery in an old factory. He features modernist painters and sculptors who are just starting to break through, painters like Max Ernst and George Grosz. Max is skeptical of all the fine words about war and peace. He's smart, amusing, married with two kids, and has a mistress. After what he's been through in the war and sees in Germany around him..."There's no future in the future," he says. His Germany now is full of rampant poverty and unemployment, tremors of Socialist revolution, casual anti-Semitism among the priviledged, and Jewish scapegoating among many others. Max is Jewish.

He meets by chance a fellow who desperately wants to be a great painter, a corporal still in the army who happpened to be in Max's army unit. The painter's name is Adolph Hitler (Noah Taylor). Hitler is angry, resentful, clammy, thoroughly unlikeable. His sketches are competent but not exceptional. Max thinks there might be something in Hitler's work if Hitler would dig deep enough to put on canvas what he feels, not just what he sees.

Well, it didn't turn out that way, of course. Hitler has a third-rate talent for art, but a first-rate talent for inflaming people with the oratory of hate, of anti-Semitism, of blaming Jews, homosexuals, "mongrels" and foreigners for Germany's defeat. Since we know what happens historically, the interest and tension in the movie arises in the pull between art and politics. Hitler is not portrayed as a monster, but as a creepy, thoroughly unsympathetic creature who discovers that "politics is the new art!"

Cusack and Taylor give very strong performances. I think Cusask is an exceptional actor, and I was glad to see that he's starting to show his age. The lines around the mouth, the puffiness under the eyes give him much more dramatic weight. Noah Taylor is little short of amazing. He captures the terrible frustrations of a third rate artist who believes he's first rate...but can't deliver the goods. His Hitler oratory is loathsome and fascinating. I couldn't place the guy until I went to IMDb. He played the adolescent David Helfgott in Shine, another virtuoso performance.

This is a serious movie with some ascerbic moments that takes its time establishing the characters and setting up the premise. The ending packs a punch. The movie is well worth seeing.

I never thought I'd see a movie that actually tried to portray Hitler as a decent chap, but this one pulls it off in style. It would have been good with a "happy" ending, but maybe that's just too far-fetched for what the film was trying to do - understand the conditions in which young(ish - Hitler is already thirty) minds are so easily warped and twisted until they become monstrous.

Cusack is Max Rothman, and he makes a good job of it - I didn't realise he could do both this and "Being John Malkovich" and ace them both. Noah Taylor makes a convincing Hitler (without the trademark moustache), a small grey splotch in an otherwise colourful milieu. The director has gone to inordinate lengths to distinguish between Rothman's whirling, fresh, high society, and Hitler's miserable, colourless and ugly barrack life.

The film is expertly constructed, with every second filled with tension, and a genuine question mark over the ending. I have never watched such an unpredictable film; there are shots which play with this ambiguity throughout and the characterisation of the Jews as loyal subjects is pleasing, having seen so many films in the past where history is projected backwards, the most obvious of these being the line in "Onegin" where early nineteenth-century gentlemen "predict" the Russian revolution.

A word of warning, though - make sure you have something lighter to watch (e.g. an episode of your favourite comedy) afterwards, as you will need reassurance that the world is not all bad.

This, along with The Singing Detective (nullify my opinion now, if you like) was one of, I think, the best films of last year. The film follows Max (John Cusack), a Jewish art dealer, and his fraught relationship with an angry, angry Hitler (Noah Taylor), living in squalid barracks and carrying a huge chip on his shoulder. With the guidance of his Jewish mentor, he gains some semblance of control, but we know he won't maintain this pretense of reason...
So the film is scary, teetering on the edge of hysteria, blending 1930's suburbia with omnipresent anarchy- a clashing of naďvity and genocide (strangely poignant in a rather bizarre Aryan puppet-show) and it's cast, from bit-parts to starring roles flesh out brilliantly- the films' adpetness at creating thumbnail portraits with a few words and a side-long glance is astonishing.
There have been gripes about it- that it's unfulfilling of it's huge potential, that it's historically innaccurate, that Hitler's eye-brows were slightly better trimmed, but I think the deft way in which the film handles small issues while still dealing with far-raching themes and, at the end of the day, a topic that has scarred the last century is admirable- and as for accusations of innaccuracy, I believe Hitler abandoned any thoughts of a career in art before the first world war, so the film doesn't pretend to be text book.
'Tis a work of art, a labour of Bohemian love and one of the few films I've seen with the line 'Hitler, c'mon, I'll buy you a lemonade' in it. It's fiction... It's been a while since I saw it at the cinema, but I'm fairly sure that none of the events portrayed happened- I have a GCSE in history to prove it- so let's sit back, enjoy, spook ourselves with Taylor's frightening performance, bask in the warm glow of Cusack's benevolence, and wallow in the sheer perfection of acting in general, atmosphere and attention to (purely fictional, mark me) detail.
James says: let the few descrepancies they take with history pass, and enjoy this thought-provoking flight of fantasy, I mean, we all know Hitler couldn't paint- but if John Cusack told me he was my father, I'd believe him.