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Review: Max
by Tyler Carey
The Unknown Hobo and I went to see Max the other night. Nothing like a movie about the origins of the Fuehrer to jumpstart an evening of drinking. But wait, this movie has John Cusack as the artistic mentor to our young anti-hero. It's gotta be good, right? Sorry if my sarcasm is a little heavy. Yes, the setup sounds like one of the worst ideas in cinematic history - a buddy movie wherein one of the lead characters is Adolf Hitler - but it actually works. The cinematography is weak, and the dialogue hackneyed at a few points, and no one can deny having seen the ending coming from the beginning of the second reel (for reasons of plot points, not the fact that we know where Hitler ends up), but the film works overall. Cusack plays the title character, Max Rothman, a German Jewish art dealer, as a Gene Hackman-esque everyman who wants to avoid conflict, but find the root causes of Hitler's anger. While the character seems more interesting than Cusack's portrayal of him, Cusack does a nice job of avoiding the potential pitfall of playing the character as Hitler's Dr. Frankenstein - indirectly creating a monster out of the best of intentions. Even British comedic actor Noah Taylor surprised me by playing Hitler as a fairly complex individual, unlike the one-note bits that were supplied to him from the screenwriter. One cannot believe that he played the buffoonish sidekick in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.If art can now be broken down into three main areas - those pieces that are interesting based on their content, those that are interesting based on their process, and those that are interesting based on the audience reaction, this film would serve to fulfill the latter category to the highest degree. This is not a film that is important on its own, but more in context to the reaction individuals had even before it was released. Everyone I know who has seen this film has come out with a different take on it - Lord knows, the Unknown Hobo and I saw it as two different films - but the most interesting take was that of several political action groups who protested the film over its alleged sympathies towards the twentieth century's worst villain. No one that I know, whether they are Christian, Jewish, agnostic or whatnot, has come to the conclusion that it was sympathetic towards Hitler. The film seems to have fallen victim to a machine that would rather have politically-correct black and white views of history. The great irony is that the film in no way tried to justify, forgive or deny any of Hitler's acts.
That said, does it attempt in a half-assed fashion to explain away some of Hitler's motives by placing them in context with the post-traumatic stress and anti-Semitism that swept Europe after World War I? Yes, and those sorts of attempts at deconstructing Hitler are the worst parts of any attempts (whether through film, art or words) to depict him. The Atlantic Monthly's Ron Rosenbaum's Explaining Hitler is a highly recommended treatise that asks why certain questions always pop up about Hitler (e.g. "Was he gay?" "Why did he want the extermination of the Jews?" "What childhood trauma provoked the Holocaust?"). Rosenbaum's end conclusion suggested that since the war, Hitler has served as mankind's recent-memory bogeyman - the Grendel of the twentieth century, almost. Our attempts to depict Hitler aren't intended so much to depict him as to try to contextualize or pigeon-hole his evil.
The Unknown Hobo and I spent a long walk to the Port Authority hashing out what the film meant, its merits, its downfalls... As we neared Madison Square Garden, our conversation about the film seemed to focus mostly on Mr. Cusack's performance. We agreed to re-view Better Off Dead and High-Fidelity and to talk over Max's meaning to his oeuvre on another beer-soaked evening...