Hitler Before the Führer

New York Times ^

[RCW2001]

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

ecause Menno Meyjes's film "Max" presents a humanized portrait of the young Adolf Hitler as a desperately ambitious young painter, it has been prejudged in some quarters as an inappropriately sympathetic apologia for one of history's monsters. But as the film observes the edgy relationship of Hitler (Noah Taylor) and Max Rothman (John Cusack), the warmly solicitous (and fictional) German-Jewish art dealer who advises him, it presents a fascinating and psychologically credible interpretation of events that may have been crucial to that monster's formation.

The movie has the temerity to imply that had Hitler found a patron, his life might have taken an entirely different turn.

Make no mistake: the 30-year-old Hitler imagined by the film is a thoroughly disagreeable creep. As he skulks through the movie, radiating a clenched, clammy phosphorescence, he could be described (in therapeutic terms) as a humorless, obsessive-compulsive rageaholic with zero tolerance for frustration. He is the sort of killjoy who, when attending a social gathering, would be deemed intriguing for the first 20 minutes but quickly would wear out his welcome with his haranguing intensity, rigid certitude and lack of social grace.

Hitler had charisma, to be sure. But the movie imagines that at this point in his life it manifested itself only on a podium. The scary later scenes, which portray Hitler as a ranting backroom orator, suggest how in a public forum his toxic mixture of high-pitched fury and egomania could strike a spark and ignite mob violence.

When we first meet Hitler, he is an impoverished, shiftless war veteran listlessly hanging around with his fellow soldiers and grumbling about Germany's loss of World War I and the country's humiliation by the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler's anti-Semitism has already coalesced into a bogus theory of racial purity. He professes a grudging admiration for Jewish clannishness, which he believes has given Jews superior intelligence. But that respect is outweighed by an icy strain of paranoid loathing for what he perceives as the contaminating Jewish influence on other cultures.

A fellow soldier, Mayr (Ulrich Thomsen), an army propaganda officer, recognizes Hitler's potential as a forceful public speaker and encourages him to speak out in beer halls. The film subtly portrays the influences of Mayr and Rothman as a tug of war for Hitler's soul.

All that said, "Max" doesn't pretend to be an accurate biography of the youthful Hitler. It is finally more concerned with the fictional Rothman than with his sour, frustrated sometime protégé. The art dealer, himself a painter until he lost his right arm in the war, is an optimistic bon vivant with a wife (Molly Parker), two children and a lover (Leelee Sobieski). This skeptical, warmhearted aesthete is well on his way to becoming a mover and shaker in an art world that the film imagines as an elegant round-the-clock party floating above the misery and desolation of postwar Munich.

"Max," which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, is at its weakest when observing Rothman's chaotic personal life. The scenes with him and his wife and family are frustratingly elliptical and lack emotional focus. But when it is reflecting on art and society, the movie comes alive. Modern art is the aesthetic and spiritual beacon that illuminates this world and points a way toward a thrilling but vague utopian future, and the rising stars circulating through this glamorous demimonde include Max Ernst and George Grosz.

The film has extravagantly stylized visual imagination. Rothman runs a gallery, eccentrically festooned with art, that resembles a giant, casually decorated warehouse. "Max" was filmed in Budapest. (Contemporary Munich looked too sleekly modern.) And the fictional gallery is actually a former locomotive factory 300 yards long. The setting's cavernous, pre-Bauhaus austerity mingles with a shadowy, voluptuous German Expressionist palette to create the overall impression of a monumental, sprawling, timeless Bohemia in which life and art have wound together into a dizzying Modernist dreamland.

This slightly eerie ambience deepens Max and Hitler's continuing aesthetic debates as Max repeatedly goads Hitler to dig into his own psyche and slap his pain and confusion onto his canvases. But the prim young painter, who clings to classical ideals of form and beauty, is too guarded and repressed to understand what Max is talking about. Max's artistic ideas are pungently embodied in a performance piece, involving a giant meat grinder, that epitomizes the kind of art that the Nazis would later condemn as decadent.

Despite his doubts about Hitler, Rothman generously agrees to take some of his paintings on consignment, but the potential customers he locates end up choosing Ernst over Hitler.

The debates between Rothman and Hitler culminate with the movie's conceptual coup, in which Hitler comes up with the iconography of National Socialism, including the swastika, and proudly presents it to Rothman, who is impressed enough to proclaim that Hitler has made his crucial breakthrough. It's a novel idea: Nazism as the art project of a failed painter. Because that iconography has yet to be attached to a political and social movement, Max sees it only as a fantastically inventive work of kitsch, a grand theme park of the imagination that today might be labeled Hitlerworld.

In its eccentric way, the movie is rather like a theme park. It is a historical fantasy connecting fact and wild supposition into a provocative work of fiction that poses ticklish questions about art and society. And the inability of Rothman, the quintessence of European urbanity and intellectual sophistication, to grasp the implications of Hitlerworld points ominously toward the future.

For Mr. Cusack the role of Max is a huge, successful leap from playing the bluff nerdy guy next door to a jovial cosmopolite, and in making that leap he doesn't sacrifice his characteristic charm and generosity. As the future Führer, Mr. Taylor masters the perilous challenge of depicting a recognizable forerunner to the Hitler we know and despise while keeping that interpretation from turning into a cartoon.

"Max" may be a brashly inventive film, but it is not an offensive one.

"Max" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for sexual situations and one scene of violence.

MAX

Written and directed by Menno Meyjes; director of photography, Lajos Koltai; edited by Chris Wyatt; music by Dan Jones; production designer, Ben Van Os; produced by Andras Hamori; released by Lions Gate Films. At the Angelika Film Center, Mercer and Houston Streets, Greenwich Village. Running time: 108 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: John Cusack (Max Rothman), Noah Taylor (Adolf Hitler), Leelee Sobieski (Liselore Von Peltz), Molly Parker (Nina Rothman) and Ulrich Thomsen (Captain Mayr).

[I_Love_My_Husband]

ping

[Fiddlstix]

Bookmark

[NormsRevenge]

The Boys from Brazil is on History Channel. Why all the fascination for all these years with the Third reich und der Fuehrer all the many years hence?

Clonaid = Boys from Brazil, ... Have a HaPPy New Year.

Good post. Yes, with a little help and encouragement, Adolf could have been a different and better person, but then, we wouldn;t have anyone to compare the Clintons too,then, would we. ;-)

[First Amendment]

Anyone who is interested in how Hitler "became Hitler" should without a doubt read "The Pink Swastika" by Scott Lively. He's got a website - http://www.abidingtruth.com/ and as far as I know that book plus others can be read from the website. The Pink Swastika has voluminous research and it is a shocker - Lively really gets into the philosophical background of Nazism. Obviously this movie doesn't get it at all. the liberals/homosexual acitivists have whitewashed Hitler's connections with the homosexual movements of early 20th century Germany.

Also, there is a German book that came out in 2001 called "Hidden Hitler" with apparent proof that Hitler himself was homosexual. If anyone knows where to get that book let us know!
I strongly urge anyone who wants to really get some background about Hitler and the Nazis to check out Lively's book.

[KellyAdmirer]

For some reason, young Hitler is a hot entertainment topic right now. Probably only putting society on a shrink's couch would answer the hidden question why.

[muleboy]

Many thanks for the post. I am really looking forward to seeing this movie. Considering Cusack's politics, I find it curious that he would explore the connections between art and politics.

I have a book of Hitler's artwork. He seemed quite talented to me, though his works were mostly of buildings. Quite accurate depictions yet distinctly lacking in action and life. Hitler seemed to be a classicist with unfortunate timing to be hawking his works in an avant garde age that shunned the ways and tastes of the past.

I thoroughly believe that had Hitler become a successful artist, he would have emerged as the Barbara Streisand of the 1920's and 30's, whose constant railings against the government policies would have amused millions and been dismissed without a second thought.

[ExpandNATO]

Provided the reviewer's summation of the Hitler and Max relationship is accurate, the action in the film can be summarized as.

Confused young war veteran fighting with various inner demons and the defeat of his country is reaching for some truth and beauty through painting.

The patron (Max) rejects this search, prodding Hitler to express his inner pain, providing such examples as a meat grinder (which has often been used as a metaphor for the totalitarian state) as part of a performance piece for Hitler to emulate. Tragically, Hitler follows Max's lead and creates the iconography of Nazism...

...and eventually, as we all should know, leads one of the most homicidal performance art pieces ever, which probably ground up Max as well.

[ExpandNATO]

The film subtly portrays the influences of Mayr and Rothman as a tug of war for Hitler's soul.

What tug of war, Mayr is trying to form Hitler into a hater and Rothman is counseling Hitler into letting out his inner pain.

[thatdewd]

To understand the young Hitler and Nazism as well, you have to study the source of Adolf's anti-semitism and the origin of the "Aryan" theology. Hitler, and those who rose to the top of the nazi heirarchy were followers of the Thule Society and similar mystical cults. Nazism was really a religion, with specific theological teachings. It was not just about "white" purism, it was an attempt to revive what Hitler and the others believed to be an ancient race with god-like powers, the Aryans. It was pure occultism, and the weirdest of the weird. All non-aryan peoples (that meant most whites, too), were a genetic threat to the re-emergence of ancient Aryan man, but the Jews especially presented a genetic problem because they carried the poison of their mono-theistic God in their blood. Hitler said this in numerous speeches. The occultic beliefs and teachings of the SS, the vanguard from which the Aryan would one day supposedly re-emerge, were especially bizarre, and completely religious in their nature. Amazing how history avoids this aspect of Hitler and nazism, choosing instead to merely pass it off as organized racism. It was much, much more than that. Hitler's early occultism was the most important factor in his pyschological makeup, and that of the other nazi leaders as well. I'm sure his frustration as an unsuccessful artist had an effect on him, but it was minor compared to other things.

[Centurion2000]

bump ..... interesting

[norraad]

How does one take oneself so seriously?

Why would I want to be a God?

What a load.

Too bad they didn't have a chill pill.

[First Amendment]

The Thule society as well as some other roots of Nazism such as Neitzche (sp?) heavily favored and promoted homosexuality and the followers of these included many homosexuals. It is well known that the SA and SS officers were notorious pederasts.
An interesting sub-note - Traditional Chinese Taoism as well as Ayurvedic medical science (the traditional medical science of India) both regard homosexual behavior as mentally and psychologically damaging. Such behaviors are considered to promote psychosis and violence. Connections between homosexuality and aggression and violence are rampant.

[Petronski]

Adolf's time as a vagabond in Vienna, painting hopelessly bourgeois architectural still-lifes, learning to hate and struggling to get by, together with his traumatic observations about his mother's slow death from cancer while under treatment by a Jewish doctor--all of this would be far more interesting than the tripe 'Max' offers us. How galling to introduce a fictional character, when so much more could be learned from the actual events. Pathetic.

[goldstategop]

If the young Hitler's would be instructors at Vienna's High Arts Academy had realized his talents lay in being a gifted architect, history might have taken a turn for the better. As an artist Hitler is completely unimpressive, but as a potential architect he had a skill in drawing buildings second to none. The only question is whether he would have pursued such a career is a question lost to history.

[Petronski]

As an artist Hitler is completely unimpressive, but as a potential architect he had a skill in drawing buildings second to none.

He was skilled at producing representations of existing structures, but there is no evidence he had any skill in creating anything new.

[aristeides]

I know of no evidence that Hitler considered himself to be God, or even just a god. He did, however, think that he had been chosen by Providence (die Vorsehung) to save the German people. He seems to have believed in a kind of racial God -- he used phrases like "the god who created our Volk".

[sheik yerbouty]

Mad Max.

[norraad]

Which brings us back to the old saying;"You can always tell a German, you just can't tell him much""

[OutsideTheBox]

Soooo...it would seem that Hitler's early days paralleled Gollum's, huh?