If Hitler met a Jewish art dealer: A musing, not a movie
Max, from screenwriter and first-time director Menno Meyjes, offers an intriguing scenario: What if, in post-World War I Munich, a struggling young artist by the name of Adolf Hitler had crossed paths with a Jewish intellectual art dealer named Max Rothman? Would the future father of the Final Solution, encouraged by this connoisseur of modern culture, have redirected all that roiling venom onto a canvas? Could the hatred and fear-mongering have been channeled into creative work, instead of toward one of the most destructive acts known to humankind?
Max, from screenwriter and first-time director Menno Meyjes, offers an intriguing scenario: What if, in post-World War I Munich, a struggling young artist by the name of Adolf Hitler had crossed paths with a Jewish intellectual art dealer named Max Rothman?
Would the future father of the Final Solution, encouraged by this connoisseur of modern culture, have redirected all that roiling venom onto a canvas? Could the hatred and fear-mongering have been channeled into creative work, instead of toward one of the most destructive acts known to humankind?
Of course, Meyjes, a Dutch-born filmmaker who wrote the screenplay for Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple, is playing with pure hypothesis. There was no Max Rothman - a veteran of the Great War (Meyjes has him lose an arm), an idealist, an avatar of the avant-garde, a Jew. Meyjes has imagined this figure - played with great effort and feeling by a woefully miscast John Cusack - from a raft of real-life artists and intellectuals, affluent, forward-thinking culturati, toying with Dadaism and dialectics.
Hitler, on the other hand, is not a figment of anyone's imagination. The architect of the Third Reich did fancy himself an artist, however, sketching and painting (and trying to gain admission to the Vienna Art Academy) until he took his decisive plunge into anti-Semitic speechifying in 1919.
Taking this provocative - and some would say unpalatable - premise, the filmmaker has fashioned an arty, theatrical fable. Max, which features Noah Taylor (the teenaged David Helfgott in Shine) as Hitler, is a meditation on art and politics, quite literally spelled out in an equation that Taylor's Hitler scrawls on a notepad one night: Art Politics = Power.
Taylor brings a seething, spiky intensity to the role, while Cusack puffs on cigarettes and tries (unsuccessfully) to appear sophisticated, complicated, European. (Cusack can be great, but he's so American, and so of this moment, that he's not believable for a second.) Leelee Sobieski has a few furtive, foxy sentences to deliver as Max's artist mistress; Molly Parker is Max's lithe, laconic ballerina wife.
Set in a world where Bauhaus modernity collides with crumbling 19th-century streetscapes, Max has the insular, tensed-up power of a theater piece. With lines that feel like long soliloquies - even as they are being framed in conversation - Max is static, stilted. This film is a philosophical musing - a humanitarian speculation, not a drama about real people, historical figures or not, who seem fully formed.
Contact movie critic Steven Rea at srea@phillynews.com or at 215-854-5629.
Max ** 1/2 (Out of four stars)
Produced by Andras Hamori, written and directed by Menno Meyjes, photography by Lajos Koltai, music by Dan Jones, distributed by Lions Gate Films.
Running time: 1 hour, 48 mins.
Max Rothman. . . John Cusack
Adolf Hitler. . . Noah Taylor
Liselore. . . Leelee Sobieski
Nina Rothman. . . Molly Parker
Parent's guide: R (violence, sex, profanity, anti-Semitic themes)
Playing at: Ritz at the Bourse and Ritz Sixteen/NJ