Posted on 01/25/2003 8:39:29 PM PST by ex-Texan
A New Film About Hitler: 'Max' is a look at life before the Reich
John Cusack defends film's three-dimensional depiction of Hitler
By Glenn Lovell
Usually affable and laid back, the very embodiment of Hollywood cool, John Cusack seems uncharacteristically edgy this afternoon. He enters the room like a fugitive in a film noir detective thriller, twitchy, suspicious. The black shirt, black slacks and haze of cigarette smoke complete the image of a hounded man.
"So what did you think of the flick?" he demands more than asks.
This is obviously not the Cusack of "Being John Malkovich" and "High Fidelity," or even "Con Air" and "Serendipity." That Cusack can scoot easily between hip indie productions and formulaic studio fare; that Cusack carries the world in his hip pocket. This one expects the sky to come crashing down.
Little wonder. He's just made a grim little film that even his staunchest fans will find tough going. "Max" stars the 36-year-old actor as Max Rothman, a one-armed art dealer in post-World War I Munich. Rothman's new discovery? A ranting war vet named Adolf Hitler (Noah Taylor). Reviewing Hitler's battle sketches, Rothman finds "an authentic new voice" who's "just scratching the surface."
Potential backers were less kind to the original "Max" script. They showed interest, then they didn't. Which is why it took three years to raise the money ($10 million), set up production in Budapest, and pull together a cast and crew that would work for virtually no money. "Everybody was terrified of it," Cusack recalls. "But we kept it going. The actor, producer, crew salaries are up there on the screen. It was an act of real passion."
Throughout his almost 20 years of stardom, Cusack has specialized in fast talkers, some lovelorn, some loathsome. Rothman felt like a departure. "He's a man crushed by war who's trying to reconstruct himself ... a very progressive, modernist spirit," observes the actor.
Almost as knowledgeable about music and art as it he is about film and experimental theater, Cusack found himself drawn to the film's Weimar Republic setting.
"I've always been interested in this period ... always fascinated by how fertile Germany was before politics and economic ruin entered into the equation," Cusack says. "How did a nation of poets and thinkers become a nation of judges and hangmen in the period between the wars? What caused that shift to the far right?"
Written and directed by Menno Meyjes, who received an Oscar nomination for "The Color Purple," "Max" is nothing if not ambitious. On one level it's a horror story, on another a black comedy shot through with gallows humor, and on yet another level an avant-garde work that melds Brechtian stagecraft with the visual style of George Grosz and other German artists of the interwar period.
"The idea was to look at Hitler through the prism of art," Cusack explains. "It's not a new idea, but I don't think people have experienced it quite this way before. Hitler did sniff around the modern art world, cubism and all those things. He was repulsed by their anti-war message, but he understood the power of the medium."
Why, then, did he reject art for fascist politics?
"He couldn't do what was required of an artist, which was to honestly express himself. He didn't have the courage to look deeply at the seeds of envy, hatred, fear, sexual frustration. He took the coward's way out: He started hating other people."
Hitler has been played by a number of great actors, including Alec Guinness and Anthony Hopkins. And usually the star's disgust for the role shows as he turns the dictator into a raving maniac easy to dismiss as Grosz-like caricature. Meyjes and Cusack wanted Taylor's characterization to be different, more three dimensional.
"By making Hitler human - which I'm sorry to say he was - you have to deal with him," Cusack says. "If he's not human, he's beyond human reckoning. He's not culpable. You're saying he didn't have or make choices."
As logical as this argument sounds, it doesn't placate those who believe that showing even a sliver of decency in the young Hitler somehow validates him and is, therefore, dangerous. Prior to its release, "Max" was attacked in press releases and e-mail by the Jewish Defense League, Cusack says.
"Talk about regressive! These people attacked our film without even seeing it. For some in the JDL it's uncomfortable to think of this man as a human being. It's easier to think of him as Grendel or as an alien transported from another planet to rule Earth."
As high as he is on "Max" and other offbeat assignments, Cusack isn't about to quit mainstream Hollywood. Already this year he has two studio films in the hopper: Columbia's "Identity," a spooky murder mystery co-starring Ray Liotta, and Warner Bros.' "The Runaway Jury," a John Grisham adaptation with Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman.
"I have a pretty good thing going," he allows. "I can do films that are more mainstream so I can do the films that I love. I'm very proud of 'Max.' I think it's the most challenging picture I've ever done. If it gets recognized with an Oscar nomination that would be great. But if it doesn't, I have no doubt that in five, six, 10 years people will view it as a serious piece."
Cusack, who amazingly has never been nominated for an Oscar, dismisses such recognition as "faddish," political, tied to how ambitious an advertising campaign you mount.
"Oscars don't have any bearing on how films are remembered," he says. "It's the films that have resonance for people that are remembered. Their value accrues over the years."
Socialism, Mr. Cusack. Socialism.
The irony is, you and your lynch-mob partners in make-believe are on the same warpath. You're just too blinded by hatred to see it.
"If we were in other countries, we would ... all of us together would go down to Washington, and we would stone Henry Hyde to death! We would stone him to death!... No, shut up! I'm not finished! We would stone (him) to death, and we would go to their homes, and we'd kill their wives and their children. We would kill their families." --
Actor/Thinker/Judge/Hangman/Wife Beater, Alec Balwin 12/98
It often helps when the actors are insane themselves like Angelina Jolie and Wynona Ryder.
It makes for what some call a "stellar performance".
If John Cusack isn't insane, the movie probably won't be any good.
Poets and thinkers were not realistic and perceptive when the national socialists came to town and offered theatre and excitement. It was romantic and that fit the sentiment of the time. President Hindenburg was boring and did not offer the entertainment value posssessed by the new bold movement seeking to win back the Fatherland's self respect (and power).
[Repeating the poets v. judges dichotomy is merely the sound of the ignorant ready to go over the hill one more time because it elevates sentiment over penetration.]
Only an actor idiot, or every other liberal, could call Hitler "far right."
Yeah, Hitler really wanted to shrink the size and power of his federal government and make his government subservient to the the rights of the individual.
Cusack, who amazingly has never been nominated for an Oscar
Seriously, the guy's an OK sketch actor. Sort of like a young Morey Amsterdam.
Only shorter.
Obviously, Hitler was not merely the reprehensible evil stereotype is always portrayed to be.
I mean, he was undeniably evil, but he had to have some part of his nature that appealed to people, or he never could have risen to power.
He had to be an evil sh*thead who could smarm and shmooz people into believing that he was the answer to their secular prayers. Sort of like our last president.
Why are you amazed? Artists have always believed they're incapable of wrongdoing. Of course they're going to believe that if Hitler had followed in their footsteps, he would have been a saint (like them).
We're dealing with people completly detached from reality.
Kinda like John Cusack.
Cusak is off where he calls Hitler as coming from the far "right" but in this statement, Cusak speaks some truth. Too many people define Hitler as the ultimate example of evil. Sure, Hitler was evil, he was maniacal, despotic, and all of those things that attempt to describe the depravity of his regime and the ruin in which he left Europe. But making Hitler the definitive example of evil sort of places the man on a pedestal, and so makes him uncomparable when we try to examine and understand the most evil people in history. If Hitler is the ultimate example of evil, how do we come to understand Stalin or Mao, or even Saddam Hussein for that matter?
History and historical figures are only worth studying if one appreciates that people throughout history are all human beings, that is they are all part of the human species, the same "animal" that we all are. In other words, people living 2000 years ago are the same as we are today where it comes to biology, instincts, psychology, how emotions affect us, etc. History from this perspective is a reckoning of the human species, and what human beings were in the past is what has made us the human beings we are today. One of the problems we have in developing this idea is that our collective hubris makes us think we are living in "new" times and that we are beyond our own history. Our modernity fools us, that is our technology and progress make many people think that we are fundamentally different than were people of the past. (People of Hitler's time were guilty of the same - afterall, they called WWI the "Great War" and the "War to End All Wars"). [Incidently, this is where many people come up with the idea that the US Constitution is outdated and requires interpretation in a contemporary context. Most of us on this site, though, understand that the founding fathers created a system of government with an understanding and appreciation of history and as an attempt to insulate America from man's previous foibles in the governing of societies.]
This whole idea of "Hitler as a human being" is not really new. It is new for Hollywood-type thinkers who must sell their ideas and philosophies to the world based upon the least common denominator (well, not all, but most of Hollywood is reduced to this factor). Actually, quite a bit of material dealing with Hitler's psychology and background exists within the body of scholarly works attempting to gain some insight into how and why Hitler developed the world view that he did, and how that view contributed to his ascension to power in post WWI Germany. It is a tall order for a movie to develop such an understanding of Hitler (especially a movie involving someone like Cusak who holds naive and ill-formed views of politics - but at least Cusak didn't write this one). However, what movies are good at doing is illuminating subjects by sparking the imagination of the viewer and getting the viewer to feel and (hopefully) think about a subject from an alternative perspective.
Just a guess, but Cusak is probably also correct where he says that the movie, because of its controversial subject matter, will probably fail to attract the attention in the short-run that he feels it warrants. But in the long-run, perhaps this movie will gain more favorable acclamation. I look forward to seeing this film.
Try telling that to a dimwit like Cusack.
The truth is something that consistently evades these people.
What crap. First of all, why do they call fascism "right"? It's not far from communism. But more important - if he wants to know why Hilter became Hitler, he should read "The Pink Swastika" by Scott Lively. It's all there at http://www.abidingtruth.com/ Also I heard about a book from Germany called "The Hidden Hitler" - if anyone knows where to get an English copy let me know. Apparently there is a lot of evidence that Hitler not only surrounded hinmself with homosexuals but was one himself. It was also a fundmental part of Nazi philosphy. The junk about homos being targeted like Jews for punishment or death is a lie. Many of the torturers and murderers were homosexuals.
Cusack doesn't want to know why Hitler was the way he was. He just wants to squeeze out some more propaganda.
Also telling is why this Cusack fellow is so enthralled with Weimar Germany? It was a crazy time with rampant homosexuality, graft, ruthlessless, perversion, craziness of all kinds. This movie is definitely worth a miss.
NAZI's are on the far left...police state stuff...Mr Cusack, as in National Socialism...get it bonehead?
Only shorter....
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Oh, man. You are on the rampage tonight.(:^D)
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