Max - The Movie

This is a film likely to divide opinion – some will take it at face value as a fiction derived from history with its attendant resonance; others will find it reductive, simplistic and potentially offensive.

The eponymous Max – a Jew from a wealthy, middle class, German family – has returned from the Great War (minus an arm) to Munich and has opened, in a dilapidated railway yard, a successful gallery selling art.
On meeting an impoverished artist and fellow veteran of the Battle of Ypres – one Adolf Hitler – Max is moved by pity and shared experience, and a tentative relationship develops.

Max rejects Hitler's art as banal and totally at odds with the modernism he himself has embraced with such enthusiasm but out of compassion he encourages the aspirant artist to continue to strive deeper.

We also learn about Hitler’s notions of German racial purity, a purity he claims is analogous to that of the Jewish people, a concept that would exclude German patriots such as Max and his family and which he does not find incongruent with having Max as a mentor.

Despite Hitler’s burgeoning public speaking, Max persists with him, directing Hitler to channel his energy into his art. Failing, Hitler resorts to creating his notional vision of Germany on paper, which Max thinks he may be able to sell.

There may be two main protagonists but this film is about Max and his life with his wife, his mistress, his art and Hitler. Noah Taylor’s portrayal of Hitler is compelling and that of his polemic disturbing. Whereas, John Cusack as Max, is more measured and more nuanced, balancing the compassionate intellectual with the indulgent individual.

This a cautionary fiction; there was no Max, and was the artist and the demagogue in Hitler so closely balanced? Of course, we know the course of history, so we know where this tale will end but what role fate or choice?

See this film, be challenged, possibly disagree but come away having had to think, remembering that Hitler, though an arch-villain of the 20th century, came from human society be it one pushed into the depths of deprivation.

Bal Chowdhary