sddavis63 More often than not, as this film ground relentlessly forward, I found myself wondering just exactly what the point of it all was - at least, when I wasn't struggling to keep my eyes open. "Plodding" would be one way to describe the pacing of the movie, with "bewildering" being one way to sum up the plot. I suppose you could say that it traces some of the early development of Hitler's anti-semitism (which, like the plot, seems a bit muddled in this movie) but in general "Max" just seems grievously lacking in purpose and direction. The performances are its primary redeeming quality; with John Cusack as Max Rothman and Noah Taylor as the young Hitler both offering decent enough performances which helped make this watchable. The story is pure fiction, based on some obvious historical inaccuracies - the most obvious of which is that Hitler, as far as I know, wasn't much involved as an artist in 1918. His "artistic" period was pre-World War I in Vienna. That aside, the story depicts the cautious relationship between Hitler the artist as the War is coming to an end and Rothman the Jewish art dealer who becomes interested in Hitler's work and tries to encourage him to release his inner rage on canvass - which would have been a service to history and humanity. It's intriguing to the extent that Hitler did have some complicated relationships with Jews in his earlier years, including the Jewish family doctor who treated his dying mother and to whom Hitler gave protection after coming to power. And you do find yourself wondering what the world would be like today if Hitler had succeeded as an artist rather than in politics.Interesting - but in the end this movie is pure fantasy, with no basis in reality. Performances aside, I'll remember it (to the extent that I remember it at all) for its poor pace and weak storyline. (3/10)

tieman64 "The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight. It denies the value of personality in man, contests the significance of nationality and race, destroys culture and brings only chaos. If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity. Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord!" - Hitler ("Mein Kampf") An interesting film by writer/director Menno Meyjes, "Max" stars John Cusack as Max Rothman, a Munich art dealer who befriends a young Adolf Hitler in the decades preceding World War 2."Max's" first act watches as Rothman and Hitler comically interact, their cheerful dialogue darkly foreshadowing Hitler's late-career atrocities. Meyjes then paints Hitler as an artist offended by burgeoning modernist and avant-garde art movements. Such movements, which Hitler associates with Jews, progressives, communists, radicals and with artists who seek to challenge more conservative traditions, prove wholly disgusting to the young Hitler. To Hitler, avant-garde art is disruptive, unsettling, challenging and confrontational. It "loosens" and "perverts", whilst Hitler wishes for "order" and "cohesion". In Meyjes' hands, Hitler's is portrayed, not only a fervent nationalist, but a man who seeks to conjure up a romantic, idealised image of a great German Empire. Hitler's vision isn't only a political vision, but a full fledged art manifesto; a desire to make real a very nostalgic, sentimental image of a unified Mother Germany. Other artists denounce Hitler. His vision is kitsch, they say. And they're right. But like many artistic hacks, Hitler nevertheless makes real his designs through sheer will and determination.Many critics have labelled "Max" a playful bit of speculation, but Meyjes' Hitler is more psychologically true to the real Hitler than most other interpretations (his is perhaps the best on-screen Hitler since Chaplin's "The Great Dictator"). Some history: Germany's monarchs, most of whom were related to monarchs in Britain, Russia and across Europe, found themselves in the late 1800s losing power. In many countries, similar aristocracies were being contested by worker or other political movements. Those monarchs who held on to their power typically did so by amping up nationalist fervour and cooking up fake wars as a means of distracting their populaces. Jump ahead several decades, and Germany has been shattered during WW1 and finds its ruling class losing power. Into this cocktail steps Hitler, an ultra right-winger who is adored, not only by the rulers of Germany, Britain and the West, but the working class in Germany and America (though fascism is largely petite bourgeois). The German masses love him because he promises a stronger Germany. Western regular Joes, meanwhile, love him because he's standing up to the "bullies" of Britain and France. The elites in the West, meanwhile, adore Hitler because he's the capitalist's best friend, crushing progressive worker movements, which he'd liken to "Jewish parasites". In a very real sense, Hitler was capitalism's reactionary ideal, the market despot who promises to eradicate unions at home and the communist juggernaut to the north.Meyjes doesn't go directly into politics, though, but instead focuses on Hitler's hatred of avant-garde art. To Hitler, modernist art is "Jew art", it is "disruptive" and seeks to "change the nature of Germany". Hitler becomes obsessed with "keeping Germany clean" and "pure", its bloodlines "untainted" and "free from Jewish contagions." Western history, for very specific reasons, tends to stop at this aspect of Hitler's racism. To many, Hitler was simply "irrationally racist". What is omitted – because it points to complex levels of complicity – is what exactly "Jew infestation" meant to Hitler. Yes, on one level, such racism was a fantasy bogeyman; an illusion or scapegoat. But on the other, German and Western rulers genuinely feared "the Jews", who were associated with communists, Marxists and (the original) Bolsheviks, despite these movements' majorities not being Jewish. In an ironic reversal of historical prejudices, in which "the Jew" was the "evil capitalist" par excellence, it was "the Jew" who was now seen to be coming to destroy the status quo. It was "the Jew" who would infect the markets, turn it inside out and bring the new plague. Hitler, and many others in Germany at the time, even blamed Jewish Marxists for Wilhelm 2's "dethronment" and loss in World War 1. Hitler's sentiments weren't just shared by Germans in power, but Pope Pius XI, who advised Europe and the West to work with Hitler and Mussolini in a coalition to stop "cultural Marxism" ("Kulturbolschewismus"), and most other Western world leaders; Winston Churchill, for example, praised Hitler, Mein Kampf and sucked up to Mussolini.Historian L.M James makes it very clear why Hitler's racism must continue to be "diluted". Contemporary capitalism's rationales and arguments have always been the same arguments espoused by the world's Hitlers. Thus, capitalism must portray itself as "natural", and must, in its paranoia, portray all alternatives as a form of "chaos" which turns people into "dead weight", denies "individualism", contests "national boundaries", is "against God" and is practised by "corruptive deviants" (the "commie", the "Jew", the "Marxist", the "pinko") who want to "destroy traditions" and "pervert our culture" (with crazy things like "civil rights").Unusual for such films, "Max" forces us to sympathise with Hitler. Meyjes' Hitler, brilliantly played by Noah Taylor, is a pitiful little thing; an angry rodent who internalises persecution and then redirects it outward, ten-fold. As the film progresses, Hitler's iconic moustache grows, his back straightens and he becomes fitted with stylish Hugo Boss; the germination of a monster.8.5/10 – Worth two viewings.

interfaithfreedom An excellent project in which Cusack excels, as he almost always does. It catches the sadness and sense of the absurd in the German art scene after the war, although it sometimes looks and feels more like Berlin than Munchen. (Wasn't George Grotz in Berlin in 1918, or was that deliberate artistic license?) In any case, the deeply melancholy undercurrent, combined with the lovely interiors, seems right to me.The film goes seriously off the rails toward the end, and a few central ideas don't work. The idea that modernism included the possibility of German fascism (and specifically the horror of Hitler and the Nazis) as a matter of course is highly subjective. The worst scene is the speech in which Hitler rails at the Jews in a hall, which came across as robotic and unconvincing. Political agitation at that time was a brawling, violent thing, in which the message of anti-Semitic German nationalists was communicated through beating people up as much as through any words. There was an intense atmosphere of systematic violence at those meetings, at least in the early days. Hitler's speech doesn't come close to capturing that, and misses the fact that whereas the far right had been anti-Semitic for a long time, most mainstream Germans had not been exposed to it that much, and thought it rather operatic and not particularly appealing as a political message. They wanted to hear other things, especially about the humiliation of Germany by the Great Powers, with anti-Semitism gaining momentum later in the 1920s. Many people will say that it's wrong to humanize Hitler and the Nazis, but that's wrong. People who make that objection want to believe that there is no Nazi in themselves, that they are completely without the capacity to commit evil. But the Nazi is in all of us, including some Jews who have internalized the aggression once directed against them. To defeat the Nazi that exists in everybody, you have to know that it's there inside you. Only if you know it's there, can you chose not to act on it.This film could be usefully viewed along with two excellent German films about Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, a group of idealistic young students and soldiers in Munchen (Munich) that in 1943 tried to overthrow Hitler and paid with their lives. Both movies are available in DVD on Amazon.com with subtitles. Different period, same moral and existential challenges.

burbs82 Who was the world's most infamous monster before he became the world's most infamous monster? That's one of the subjects tackled in 'Max', which I would have titled 'Hitler and Me'.Being fairly well versed in World War II history and having read 'Mein Kampf', I honestly didn't find the humanistic depiction of Hitler that controversial. Hitler may have ultimately been responsible for one of several major inhuman events in history, his just happens to be one of the more recent, but only humans can be inhuman. Though given the politically correct, and highly oversensitive nature of society today, it's not difficult to imagine people finding the subject "offensive". The film actually plays into this preconception, and a very human Hitler is a clever platform for the subject of the film, which is actually art and expression, and the main character, Max Rothman (John Cusack), delights in shattering social morays with his artwork.Rothman is a Jewish art dealer from a wealthy family, who develops an interest in a poor, struggling, and embittered young Adolf Hitler. Having both served in the "Great War", and with Rothman taking pity on Hitler, an interesting dichotomy between the two men forms an unusual relationship. The two seem to be polar opposites, not only in their backgrounds and personalities, but also in their approach to their work, but they have more in common than is readily apparent. The difference is in their expression.Max, feeling slighted by the loss of his right arm, has embraced modernism, or abstract art, which is comparatively a mockery of traditionalism. Modernism, for Rothman, is his way of getting back at society for what it has done to him.Paradoxically, Hitler is the traditionalist. He despises abstract art, yet Rothman deals primarily in modernism. Still living in the barracks of the German army, homeless with no friends or family, and desperately trying to get Rothman to sell his work at a time when abstract modernism was all the rage (and sadly, still is), he too feels as though life has stolen something from him. But where Rothman takes his revenge conceptually in the art world, Hitler begins to plot his in another art medium that is perhaps even more grossly misunderstood today than it was then, oratory and politics. Just as the two are the verge of a mutual understanding of one another, a breakthrough realization of commonality, a few sad twists by a cruel fate intervene, and the rest is history.John Cusack is charming as Rothman, the affable and seemingly carefree fellow, who secretly bears disdain for the society that has pointlessly "disarmed" him. Noah Taylor is exceptional as der Fuhrer, whose own disdain for society he makes well known to all who hear his screaming, sociopathic rants that helped catapult him to the most well-known fascist dictator in modern history, but what he keeps secret, buried forever by a world that will only see a monster, is a sentimentality, a love, for art. A love he could afford that Rothman could not. Art students may find the traditionalist/modernist debate interesting. Prior to seeing the film, I once wrote a scathing essay on Marcel DuChamp, who is actually mentioned in the movie, criticizing his modern art piece "The Fountain", the urinal he painted and submitted to a New York gallery. It was basically a rant against modern art that was not at all unlike Hitler's criticisms of modern art in the film. I've actually seen some of Hitler's watercolors, which from what I've heard are his only surviving works. They're scenic houses, surprisingly calming and serene. One of Rothman's "displays" in the film, raises an interesting question... "What could have been?"