While audiences recognize Hitler as a real figure, many may not be aware that Max is a fictional creation. This blurring of fact and fiction concerns Morris Casudo, regional director of the San Diego Office of the Anti-Defamation League.
MORRIS CASUDO:
"I think to watch this film without some degree of historical grounding opens up the possibility of misunderstanding, misinterpreting what is being portrayed."
And what Max wants to portray is a young Hitler whose destiny is not yet set. The year is 1918 and Hitler is an awkward, isolated young man looking for a place to fit in. For the moment the German army is paying his meager way. But then he meets Max and new possibilities open up. Max, as played by John Cusack, urges Hitler to express himself through art.
Max : "It doesn't have to be good, it doesn't have to be beautiful it just has to be true. And even if it's a lie make it an intereesting lie and I'll put it up I swear."
But the army offers Hitler another path. It encourages him to give speeches that tap into anti-semitic sentiments festering just below the surface. Max hears one of these speeches and senses a potential in Hitler that might be dangerous if channeled the wrong way.
Max : "If you put the same energy into your art as into your speeches, you may have something going."
The possibilities Max offers exist only in the mind of writer-director Menno Meyjes. But we as contemporary viewers know the path that Hitler finally took, says Morris Casudo.
MORRIS CASUDO : "In the movie Hitler was a monster with a small m by 1933 he was a monster with a capitol "M" and so why would anyone have presumed what the small "m" monster was to become."
Filmmaker Meyjes suggests that Hitler's path was determined by his inability to express himself through his painting. And instead choose a different form of expression.
Hitler : "Politics is the new art. Yes my whole life has been a detour to this moment. Everything I've struggled to learn about art, about design, color, composition, theater, opera, architecture, I'm gonna stuff it all into this and make it live again."
Some may object to the film portraying Hitler as human because they see only the monster. But to see him as just evil ignores the more chilling and distrubing truth-that he was human and still capable of the most horrific crimes against humanity. As producer Andras Hamori puts it "in order to understand the monster, you have to accept that he had a human face." In Max, Hitler makes a choice. In contrast to Max, who chooses a constructive way to deal with his inability to express himself through art; Hitler channels his energy into something destructive. And you get the sense that Hitler takes the army's path because it accepts him and gives him a place to fit in. In an ironic twist, it's the destructiveness of Hitler's speeches that ultimately rob him of a chance to show his art.
As played by Noah Taylor, Hitler is sullen, humorless and prone to fits of temper. He's a sharp contrast to the even-keeled, trenchantly funny Max that Cusack creates. Cusack's Max strikes us as very contemporary and a symbol of sanity. Whereas Taylor's Hitler is a portrait of extremes. But maybe that's fitting since Morris Casudo says Germany at that time was a place of extremes.
MORRIS CASUDO : "Although I said I would not have voluntarily seen this movie, having seen it I think it's a powerful portrayal of a society in extremis being led by the most extremist elements, and so I would encourage people to see that film, it's chilling, frightening, discomforting, disturbing but so is life. I think this film is valuable in showing a society that was being torn apart."
Max is an ambitious, daring work that doesn't always succeed artisticly. But it does make you ponder some provocative what if's.
