Max

Choosing a 'controversial' subject on which to base a film is not necessarily a passport to interesting cinema, and sometimes the trick can backfire with a vengeance.

But Max, which in the build-up to its UK release has been slowly creeping into the media as the film that 'humanised' Hitler by showing him as an angry young artist, did not disappoint.

In 1918 Munich with the air of a city that could just as easily be 50 years ago or yesterday, something first-time director Mennos Meyjes wanted to perceive, Max follows the life of Max Rothman (played by John Cusack, and very loosely based on Josef Neumann and Hitler's several other Jewish art dealers), a self-confident Jew from a wealthy family with a stylish home, a devoted wife (Molly Parker), two lovely children, and a mistress (Leelee Sobieski).

Max is a former soldier who came back from WWI without one of his arms and as an artist with only one hand, Max finds himself unable to paint, which leads him to start selling art in a revamped warehouse turned into a modern art temple.

On the evening of an opening show of expressionist paintings, Max meets an inspired young artist named Adolf Hitler, a down and out war veteran, who approaches him with the hope that he'll consider showing his art in the gallery.

Max empathizes with veterans like Hitler who have few prospects in Germany's post-war depression, so he advances him some money against consignments and advises him, "Get out of politics. ... What would you rather do, change the way people see or how they pay their taxes?"

They start an unlikely and somewhat thorny friendship amid the restlessness of a humiliated post-war Germany and the film veers off into a kind of artistic and philosophical spiral.

Dealing with a subject this taboo and difficult is brave, but the key is all about balance. Max does balance all of the issues of looking into a fictional account of someone as terrible as Hitler, but some may walk away feeling as if this is the kind of film that humanizes a monster.

In my mind, Max does humanize Hitler, but not in a way that you could feel any sort of compassion for the man.

It just makes you realize that while Hitler was a terrible individual who terrorized the world, he wasn't the devil - he was an awful human that had a terrible vision of what life was all about and this film seeks to illuminate the forces that make a despairing, desperate man cynically choose evil.

It also puts a face to at least one person who might have suffered.

Rothman embodies two strands of European Jewry. A patriot who enlisted in the army, he represents those who thought of themselves as German (or Polish or Russian) -- and never imagined that they, as Jews, could be construed by political opportunists as enemies of the state.

There is not a single frame in Max that does not evoke the monstrosity of the Holocaust. From the opening shot of train tracks -- Rothman's gallery is located in an abandoned train depot -- to its shattering conclusion, it does not flinch from the horror of history and may have one of the most powerful scenes ever witnessed.

Without giving a lot of the ending away, almost anyone will find it hard not to feel brutalized after watching the play of events in the last 10 minutes of the film.

The film's strongest point is that it questions the idea of destiny.

"What if Hitler was able to successfully pursue an artistic career? What if he never discovered his voice and his ability to ramble on in explosive, fanatical rants? What if he was looking for someone to save him?"

And naturally, we know how this film ends. We know where Hitler's fate lies. Yet Taylor's portrayal of the 20th century's most infamous villain still reaches to the audience, reminding us that once upon a time, Hitler was simply an angry young man who desperately wanted to become an artist.

And as such, you can feel yourself wanting to warn this bizarre man to stick with drawing and art.

The other interesting level of Max lies in the creation of propaganda from art. Artistic and political theory mesh and clash, forming a whole new form of expression and communication. When Hitler begins to discover the power of words, he is torn between art and politics.

It's still hard for us to grasp the scale and perversity of Hitler's artistic imagination and when Taylor growls at Cusack, "Politics is the new art, Rothman! I am the new avant-garde," it highlights the immense, strange reality.

Max sells mostly modern art and hates Adolf's conservative, traditional style. The future Fuhrer indulges in "no alcohol, no caffeine, no nicotine, no meat," and incidentally shows little interest in women.

Max encourages the young man to express his obvious rage on canvas. He thinks Hitler might be great if he could channel his own war-vet rage into anti-conventional art and keeps exhorting Hitler to stop being lazy (as his real dealer did) and "go deeper" into his own soul, but Hitler's heart was a cavity.

He had few true connections with humans (a loner as a kid) except as objects of manipulation.

Max is a brilliant exploration of the human impulse for self-expression and the deviant, destructive path that extremely frustrated people choose -- with Jews frequently their target.

What the film mourns and what powerful questions it raises appears to be that if only Hitlers artistic career worked out, could the greatest horror of the 20th century have been avoided?

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