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Review of Max

By Scott B.

There's an amazing line of dialogue that occurs about halfway into Max where the title character says: "Come on, Hitler, let me buy you a glass of lemonade."

Wait a minute, I'm sure you're saying, is that Hitler &#Array; as in Adolf? As in the single most monstrous, depraved, and evil human being of the Twentieth Century, head of the Third Reich and arch-enemy of civilization in World War II? That Hitler? Well, yes.

The reason I choose that line of dialogue to both introduce and summarize writer/director Menno Meyjes's Max is because it pretty much encapsulates the movie in a nutshell. Can we imagine &#Array; do we even want to imagine &#Array; that Adolf Hitler (played by Noah Taylor) was once a struggling artist who was treated to a simple glass of lemonade? And, even more provocatively, can we contemplate that he might have been bought that glass of lemonade by someone like Max (John Cusack), who just happens to be a Jewish arts patron (a fictionalized composite of several key figures in the art scene of the time) in post-World War I Germany? If your mind is reeling at these questions, just wait until you see the movie.

Meyjes (best known as the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter of Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple) has delivered a film that is bound to polarize audiences. But it's also a movie that offers up an unimpeachable truth: No matter what Adolf Hitler did, he was a human being, just like me and you: He had fears and aspirations and he even drank the occasional glass of lemonade.

The setting is Munich, Germany, in 1918, recovering from World War I, and the story details the fortunes of two very different veterans of the war: Max is brilliant, handsome, and accomplished; he has a beautiful wife (Molly Parker) and a lovely mistress (Leelee Sobieski); yet, despite his enviable existence, the war robbed him of an arm &#Array; and, since his ambition was to be an artist, his ability to paint &#Array; so he has channelled all of that creative energy into the financially precarious ownership of an art gallery. The young painter Adolf Hitler, on the other hand, is everything Max isn't: Bitter, unpleasant, unattractive and living a pauper's existence. Yet these two men, with shared experiences of the horrors of war and profound convictions about Art, find something resembling a common ground. And, oddly, something almost like a friendship. Noah Taylor and John Cusack in Max

As the above summary might indicate, this is a supremely disturbing and risk-taking movie; however, the very power of the ideas which it explores almost makes it easy to miss its many flaws. But it does have a lot of problems on a purely cinematic level. While this was an original screenplay, it often feels like a stage play &#Array; scenes go on and on (and then on some more), and so much of the story and ideas is communicated through dialogue rather than images (an enormous misstep, given what a rich visual environment Germany was between the wars). And though Cusack and Taylor are absolutely amazing (I wouldn't be surprised to see Oscar nominations for both), I wasn't so impressed with Sobieski and Parker &#Array; for a movie so defiantly uncommercial, their characters seem to exist so there can be a couple of (admittedly gorgeous) women in the film.

Further, for a movie that attempts to humanize and explain the monstrous pathology of Adolf Hitler, the screenplay is a little shallow. To go by what Meyjes presents, Hitler was pretty much solely influenced by World War I and its aftermath; yet many historians and biographers place as much emphasis on Hitler's childhood as a key to his character (even something as dumb and silly as Ira Levin's Hitler-cloning thriller The Boys From Brazil acknowledged the importance of family dynamics in shaping Hitler). In fairness to the film, Max doesn't claim to be a biopic, but rather a sort of historical fable &#Array; still, if the whole point of the movie is to present Hitler as a human being, then the early years just can't be ignored.

All of that said, I give Max a strong recommendation. Despite its many missteps, the film attempts to do so much &#Array; and often succeeds. Like Oliver Stone's Nixon (another film that humanized a reviled historical figure), this is a movie that chooses humanity over rhetoric. It doesn't even come close to excusing Adolf Hitler, but it does make a valiant &#Array; if not wholly accurate or satisfying &#Array; attempt to explain him. And, in a world where black-&-white and good-versus-bad philosophies are becoming increasingly useless and destructive, this film's lesson is one worth learning.

Max [2002] Releases Dec. 27th, 2002
theater dvd