How Hitler Could Have Been Stopped

According to Hollywood.

I recently rewatched the 2002 film Max, a strange little movie starring John Cusack in his usual cerebral yet charming romantic lead role, and Noah Taylor as…Adolf Hitler.

The film is a kind of unlikely buddy movie. He’s an erudite curator of fine art (insert clip of Cusack being witty). He’s the 20th century’s greatest monster (cut to Hitler shouting). Together, they can save the world. Or not.

If you think that’s crass, try watching the actual film, which contains lines like ‘You’re an awfully hard man to like, Hitler’. Which is darkly funny, except the film is not a comedy. It’s a tragedy about how the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust could have been avoided had young Hitler been a bit better at art.

This idea has been suggested elsewhere, for example in Steven Pressfield’s book The War of Art, about overcoming procrastination (which he calls ‘Resistance’):

You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study. He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts and later to the School of Architecture. Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.

Pressfield’s book was released the same year as Max, so it’s possible he saw the film and added this at the last minute, or more likely both Pressfield and the writer of Max came across the idea somewhere else.

Oddly, Hitler’s artwork has also been in the news lately due to Jimmy Carr destroying one of the former’s paintings in a new Channel 4 show, Jimmy Carr Destroys Art. I have not yet watched the show, but the title sounds like something Alan Patridge would say into his dictaphone on a particularly dull Sunday afternoon. The fact that Carr can get this made is an impressive reflection of his considerable clout, if nothing else.

Clearly, the image of Hitler the artist fascinates people, and Max attempts to weave this into an entire motion picture. And it’s actually not bad. The film is perfectly compelling, if somewhat uneven.

Cusack is doing what Cusack does, but instead of trying to charm some young lady with impeccable taste in alternative rock music, he is trying to charm a psychopathic future dictator.

Noah Taylor has a much more difficult job. As a slightly gawky Australian, he is exceptional at playing slightly gawky Australians, most notably the teenage version of pianist David Helfgott in Shine.

Playing a young Hitler is somewhat more challenging. He nails the young, uptight artist part, but not so much the screaming about Jews part. To be fair, it is now hard for anyone to compete with Bruno Ganz’s extraordinary performance in Downfall, which came out two years after Max. Though someone must have been impressed by Taylor, as he reprised the role of Hitler for the American series, Preacher, in 2016.

It probably also helps Cusack that his character is fictional, a hypothetical art dealer named Max Rothman who lost an arm in the First World War, and along with it his hopes of becoming a painter. His loss leads him to encourage (and finance) others to do what he no longer can. Whereas Hitler’s war wounds are emotional; it is bitterness, the film suggests, combined with poverty and a dollop of opportunism, that leads him astray.

As Rothman is Jewish, it is not surprising that tensions between the two escalate, and (spoiler alert) it does not end well for Rothman. Hilter, on the other hand…well, no spoiler alert necessary there.

The ending is pretty brutal, and reminds us that we have not really been watching an buddy movie, of course, but a chilling drama of a truly tragic series of events.

This tonal shift is what makes the movie so strange. Or rather, the fact that the tone was ever anything but chilling. We are lulled, despite the obvious absurdity of such a premise, into thinking this could somehow be a low-key dark indie comedy, until the ending jolts us back into the horrific reality.

Yet one is left unsure how much of this is the filmmakers’ intent, or whether the film simply had an impossible task from the outset. The casting of Cusack, along with some clunky lines in the script, probably exacerbates the tonal issues. It is not that Cusack is bad (I don’t think I’ve ever seen him give a bad performance) it is just that he is in the wrong film. Or perhaps that the film itself is wrong, or at least misguided.

What we are left with is a nailed-on three star movie. Rotten Tomatoes has the critics’ score at 69%, and the audience on 64%. This is completely correct, and the film is only elevated to ‘probably should watch’ level by the grimly fascinating subject matter.

Indeed the fact that I have watched it at least twice, and am now writing about it, despite still not being sure it is any good, suggests there is something more to this odd and slightly disturbing little film. Though that something may well just be our ongoing cultural obsession with Hitler, and one’s inevitable curiosity when presented with a bold yet flawed attempt at showing us another angle on his life.

This article is part of an occasional series for members I might call ‘Film Fridays’. It’s a break from the culture war stuff and might introduce you to some films you haven’t seen. Let me know what you think in the comments, but please be polite or you will not get nice things anymore x