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Max is the much discussed film about Hitler's youth
in Munich as an aspiring painter, and his relationship with a
fictional Jewish art dealer named Max Rothman.
Despite what you have read, Max is not a very good
movie. It is a very intelligent discussion of art and politics,
performed by excellent actors, but it still isn't much of a movie. It
is slow, talky, and lifeless. Visually, it looks like the work of
someone who has never directed before, which it is. If you close your
eyes, it sounds like the rehearsal for a two person play
off-off-Broadway, the type of show performed for audiences of
intelligentsia numbering a dozen or less. In this case, the two
characters spend most of their time talking about art theory. I had to
struggle for wakefulness, even though I'm interested in the art
theories of the period after WW1, in which modernism (represented by
Max) struggled to attain a sturdy foothold in the art world, while
traditionalists (represented by Hitler) rejected and condemned the new
trend toward abstraction.
Although it is not without strengths, the film fails
my basic litmus test of historical biopics, which is this: if you
change the main character's name to Dieter Distelfink, if you thought
it was about fictional characters, would you still want to watch it?
The answer is obviously "no". The main character holds our attention
only because we know what his life will become after the period
portrayed in the film.
The film does have a good ending.
SPOILERS
Hitler (Noah Taylor) is convinced by Max, his Jewish
art dealer (John Cusack), that he must choose between art and
politics. If he wants to be an artist, he must take all of the energy
and rage that he puts into his speeches and channel them into his art,
giving it a personal voice. Max promises Hitler a one-man show if he
is willing to commit exclusively to art. Max sees this as a weighted
strategy on his part. He is doing more than supporting a young artist.
He knows what Hitler's speeches are like, and wants to do his part to
silence them.
The two men arrange to meet in a cafe that night to
discuss Hitler's decision.
Hitler decides in favor of art, but before his
meeting with Max, he has a speech to make at a National Socialist
rally. He agrees to give the speech as usual, but tells the party
organizers that it will be his last speech, because he will be a
full-time artist. He does such a good job on his speech that he whips
the drunken army crowd into a frenzy of hatred, after which they take
to the streets and start beating up Jews. Their victims include Max, who
is on his way to the meeting with Hitler.
Hitler makes it to the cafe, lays out his paintings,
and is ready to begin a new life away from politics. When the art
dealer fails to show up on time, Hitler becomes agitated. By the time the
cafe reaches closing time, Hitler is enraged and storms out, his hopes
for a career in art dashed because he had been stood up and betrayed
by a Jew.
The movie ends there. We all know that he will turn
to politics full time, with horrible consequences for the world.
END SPOILERS
The film includes some important history lessons
which can't really be learned from a book. In just a decade and a half
after this story took place, Hitler would be chancellor of Germany,
but in 1918 he was a corporal in a defeated army, living in a
barracks, in poverty, his heart filling with outrage over his fate and
that of his country. How did such an unlikable nobody come to the
country's leadership? The film gives a plausible historical context.
He was surrounded by millions of others who felt
what he felt, the shame and humiliation of having fought for four
years, only to have their country chopped into bits and castrated by
the Treaty of Versailles. The outraged Germans were determined to get
back Silesia, Alsace-Lorraine, the Danzig corridor, and the
Sudetenland, all areas taken from them and distributed among other
European countries. Remember that large chunks of their mighty country
were handed to countries they considered not only enemies, but
insignificant enemies. In order to understand how they felt, imagine
how the United States would feel if a large chunk of its land,
including the people now living there, were mandated by the United
Nations as a home land for al-Qaida. Such an action would leave
Americans flabbergasted, and would provoke a depth of outrage that
would engender various violent anti-Arab hate groups. If a man was
cunning enough to organize these groups effectively, he could even attain
national prominence. That is the same feeling the Germans felt after
Versailles. Hitler would give that outrage a voice, a sense of wounded
German pride which even Max, the rich Jewish art dealer, would have
agreed with.
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