John Cusack plays Max Rothman, a Jewish art dealer who lost an arm while serving on the Western Front. Max lives a bourgeois life surrounded by artists, intellectuals, and a loving family. Enthralled with new artistic movements emerging after the war, exemplified by Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, he sees modernism as a path towards redemption for Germany.
Noah Tyler portrays Hitler as pitiful, desperate, and uncompromising. A veteran of four years on the Western Front, he's a failed artist alienated with post-war Germany. Modernism's emphasis on absurdity and irrationality repels his more classical and puritanical tastes.
When Hitler stumbles into Max's gallery, the two begin debating what constitutes great art. Hitler believes art's purpose is to reinforce the moral values that hold civilization together. Rothman believes art must challenge convention for the future to have any hope.
Despite Hitler's abrasive nature, Max sees potential in the abrasive veteran, and they bond over their time serving in the war. Max repeatedly tries to steer Hitler away from his antisemitic obsessions. These scenes are compelling but strangely airless, they never go beyond showing Hitler incapable of challenging his own beliefs. Cusack's contemporary screen presence sometimes feels out of synch with the period setting, as though he just walked in from a '90s indie film.
Hitler finds another mentor in a German officer who encourages him to enter politics and master another emerging art form: propaganda. Ideas of racial purity and national humiliation begin to shape the nascent fascism of the era. Hitler develops his performance skills in beerhalls, recognizing the power of imagery and theatricality to stir a crowd.
At one point, Max observes Hitler giving a frenzied speech and is repelled by the racist messaging but captivated at the spectacle of it all. Later on in the film, Hitler tells Max, "Politics is the new art."
Written and directed by Menno Meyjes, Max never fully find its footing. A broader film about the fractured artistic climate of early Weimar Germany may have yielded something more compelling. Instead, the film narrows itself to an uneasy relationship that ultimately feels too contrived to sustain the story.
Hitler finds another mentor in a German officer who encourages him to enter politics and master another emerging art form: propaganda. Ideas of racial purity and national humiliation begin to shape the nascent fascism of the era. Hitler develops his performance skills in beerhalls, recognizing the power of imagery and theatricality to stir a crowd.
At one point, Max observes Hitler giving a frenzied speech and is repelled by the racist messaging but captivated at the spectacle of it all. Later on in the film, Hitler tells Max, "Politics is the new art."
Written and directed by Menno Meyjes, Max never fully find its footing. A broader film about the fractured artistic climate of early Weimar Germany may have yielded something more compelling. Instead, the film narrows itself to an uneasy relationship that ultimately feels too contrived to sustain the story.
Reportedly Meyjes took the script to Steven Spielberg, they had previously collaborated on The Color Purple and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Spielberg praised the script but passed on the project sensing the film would offend holocaust survivors. That speaks to the contradictions at the heart of Max, a film constrained by the enormity of the figure at its center.
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