I suppose I'm just getting old and have less and less tolerance for self-indulgent people with every passing year. Having spent much of my life in varying states of depression until my thirties, and finding myself now pushing fifty with a steamroller and painfully aware of my own mortality, the notion of dwelling on how life is punishing us in a way we don't deserve seems a colossal waste of time. Get some good cognitive/behavioral therapy, learn to look at your life in terms of what you have instead of what you lack, and get on with it already.

Perhaps this viewpoint is why I am less offended by screenwriter Menno Meyjes directorial debut, MAX, than than someone whose grandmother lost nine siblings and her parents in Hitler's camps ought to be.

It has become fashionable today to refer to political leaders who commit heinous offenses against humanity as "The New Hitler." Regarding Osama Bin Laden as "The New Hitler" is, just, like, SO 2001; and Saddam Hussein's role as "The New Hitler" already seems, just, like, SO 2002 in the face of Kim Jong Il (that's spelled "eye-ell", Mr. pResident; he's not "Kim Jong the Second"). But even though it means that Josef Stalin, a butcher of impressive credentials himself, gets short-changed, it is Adolf Hitler who holds the title as the 20th century's Monster di tutti Monsters.

Yet these simple labels ignore the larger picture. Assuming you believe the Official Party Line (or at least the one that existed prior to the anointment of Saddam Hussein as the Monstre du Jour) that the events of September 11, 2001 were precipitated by nineteen America-hating Middle-Eastern men inspired and financed by Osama Bin Laden, you also must look at this hatred and the context in which it evolved -- not to excuse the crimes of September 11, but because understanding the causes and eliminating the conditions in which hatred breeds does far more to prevent the development of homicidal despots than does indiscriminate bombing. Adolf Hitler didn't arise in a vacuum, but was shaped by the social and political forces that took place during his formative years. And it is those forces that MAX attempts to examine.

Yes, the study of the individual psychology of evil is audacious. But simply labeling the Hitlers of the world and those who have followed him as monsters is easy. Understanding the conditions that breed them and trying to eliminate those conditions is work -- hard work, and perhaps it is just not human nature to be able to make that leap. But as our government prepares to send yet another generation of American young men off to die, we owe it to ourselves to at least try. Maybe this time we can learn something, though somehow I doubt it.

As MAX takes shape, the young Adolf Hitler (Noah Taylor) is an impoverished war veteran who has come home to nothing. Disillusioned by what he sees as Germany's capitulation in its defeat, he has nothing -- no hope, no job, no vision of his future, except that he believes he is an artist. Encouraged by art dealer Max Rothman (John Cusack), who if not believing in Hitler's talent, realizes that "there's something rattling behind your curtain," Hitler struggles to reconcile his own view that "art should only reflect the eternal values and natural laws of harmonious proportions, nobility and dignity" with the postmodernism taking over the art world in the work of George Grosz, Paul Klee, and others -- the works he will later regard as "degenerate art". In Hitler's mind, modern art, rather than building on the previous generation's work, undoes that work. Rothman is himself a frustrated artist, having lost an arm at the Battle of Ypres; at which his own battalion served alongside Hitler's. But perhaps because he had the stabilizing influences of a wife, children, and a father with money, he was able to reinvent himself as an art dealer and mentor. It takes a certain audacity to write a Jewish character who tells a young Adolf Hitler to "find your authentic voice" and "paint your rage; paint that anxiety," while at the same time, Hitler's commanding officer is admonishing him to use his rage to create a new movement that will keep the military in business: "War is vitality," Captain Mayr (Ulrich Thomsen) says. "War is the hygiene of the world. An army at peace is like a whore at mass -- of no use to anyone."

The idea of drawing the sharp contrast between the physically injured Jew who successfully transitions to a peacetime career selling art and the emotionally injured Hitler who seemed unable to make the transition to one creating it must have seemed irresistable to Mayjes, who has demonstrated a gift for complex characterizations before, as the screenwriter behind two of Steven Spielberg's most underrated films, THE COLOR PURPLE and EMPIRE OF THE SUN. His screenplay for MAX is arguably one of the most literate of the year, and is full of observations about human nature, art, and politics, while never once sounding forced or preachy. This is a script that would work beautifully as a stage play, which in no way diminishes its impact on the screen, for Mayjes also has an eye for the dramatic impact of filmmaking. Rothman's gallery is an abandoned ironworks which functions as a kind of post-industrial age showcase for the artists he deems to be important. Rothman isn't quite sure what to make of Hitler. He knows there's something there, but when Hitler is finally successful at finding his true vision, in the form of rough sketches of the imagery for the resurgent Germany he envisions as his future, Rothman regards it as a kind of retro-kitsch; the sketches resembling a post-WWI version of Bruce McCall's demented futurism.

Co-Producer Cusack fought mightily to get this film financed, made, and distributed. After all, trying to find the root causes of Hitler isn't exactly the kind of project that draws Hollywood money. But Cusack, who has been on the screen almost constantly for nearly twenty years and is still only thirty-six; who has managed to move almost effortlessly among romantic comedies (Say Anything, High Fidelity), edgy arthouse fare (The Grifters), and big-budget blockbusters (CON AIR); and who has even inspired a Presidential draft campaign, isn't about to be deterred. Cusack is arguably one of the most interesting presences in movies today. He has a boyish charm that women love, an everyguy affability that men like, a snarky edge that keeps even his most earnest performances from veering into preciousness, and a fiercely guarded privacy that if you've ever seen him in an interview, gives an impression that he doesn't even exist off-screen. His Max Rothman bears a surface similarity to his characterization of the young patron of the arts Nelson Rockefeller in The Cradle Will Rock, but here even the trademark Cusack irony takes the shape of something darker and more profound. It's the cynicism of a man who's already been through hell rather than the angst of the callow boy. It's perhaps Cusack's most fully-realized role yet.

Despite competent if unmemorable supporting performances by Molly Parker as Max' wife, Lee Lee Sobieski as his mistress, and Ulrich Thomsen's Captain Mayr, MAX is essentially a dialogue between two men. As the young Adolf Hitler, Australian actor Noah Taylor has a difficult task. Much ink has been devoted, mostly by people who haven't seen the film, to how terrible it is to try to make Hitler a sympathetic figure. Taylor's young Adolf Hitler is hardly sympathetic. He's a miserable, "sniveling little rat-faced git", seething with a sense of how the world has cheated him. He fancies himself a great artist because it's the only thing he has to feel good about, but is unable to tap into any talent he does have because of his relentless self-loathing. Taylor, his rubbery face contorted and twisted, suggests without necessarily resembling, the image of Hitler we have come to know. It's an effective performance that stops just short of being too over-the-top to be credible. Far from making Hitler sympathetic, this characterization forces us to recognize a fact about evil that we don't want to admit: That evil doesn't spring forth suddenly from the cabbage patch. Even a Hitler, even an Osama bin Laden, a Saddam Hussein, a Nicolae Ceaucescu, a Josef Stalin, was born to a mother, into a family, was a child at one time. Something happened along the way with these men, perhaps something that could have turned any of us into something similar, except for a twist of fate.

That there is a path along which lie accidents of birth, parentage, socioeconomics, culture, and the world's political realities of the time that leads such men towards their evil deeds is something we must recognize. Branding this sort of evil as some sort of accident of nature, a random occurrence, is too easy. It's a cheap way out; removing the concept of evil from the realm of human complicity in creating it, fostering it, and carrying out its deeds. It is far preferable, if not easier, to force ourselves to do the work to understand. If MAX is guilty of a facile, albeit fictional, explanation of the rise of Hitler as essentially a miscommunication, it must be applauded for at least trying to address the reality that evil is a very human, not superhuman, condition.

-- Jill Cozzi

Review text copyright © 2002 Jill Cozzi and Cozzi fan Tutti, © 2003 Mixed Reviews. All rights reserved. Reproduction of text in whole or in part in any form or in any medium without express written permission of Mixed Reviews or the author is prohibited.

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