If you're a screenwriter, you have to establish your main character with one or two sentences of description, sentences that tell a director, producer, or actor how to play a person about whom they know nothing.

With Taxi Driver, Paul Schrader couldn't do it and he wrote an entire page before the script deconstructing Travis Bickle. But even that begins with "TRAVIS BICKLE, age 26, lean, hard, the consummate loner." And honestly, that does the job.

In his Chinatown screenplay, Robert Towne introduces the ostensible villain of the piece, Mulwray, as "a slender man in his sixties, who wears glasses and moves with surprising fluidity." Towne takes the opposite tact from Schrader and doesn't give away the store.

But what do you do if your main character is a young corporal in the German army by the name of Adolph Hitler. You can't very well write, "ADOLPH HITLER, upper 20s, lean, hard, fifteen years from horrible genocide." You can't do that and yet anybody reading your script, or seeing your movie, will [hopefully] already know where the story is going, even if the movie doesn't follow it that far. The end has been written already in blood and even if that's not your writing intent, your main character has a horrible backstory that imposes itself (As well it should) on everything he does. But how do you write that?

The Anti-Defamation League has been in overdrive this past year defending all of our collective innocences from any kind of humane depictions of Adolph Hitler. Between this an an upcoming miniseries starting Robert Carlyle (which conjures up genuinely disturbing images of Hitler doing the Full Monte), the ADL is worried that these movies will try to rationalize and excuse Hitler and that will somehow change our perceptions of his actions.

I disagree (And the ADL has relented after actually seeing Max, though the jury is still out on the miniseries). Understanding evil doesn't make it less evil it just helps us learn from it. However, there are reductive master narratives about Hitler's hatred for the Jewish people and relying exclusively on any of those *could* be dangerous. Simplifying a dementia that led to the death of six million Jews (and a similar number of combined Catholics, homosexuals, Communists, and gypsies) is a problem. There's the story that after a Jewish art dealer scorned Hitler's painting he decided to hate the Jews. Or that he got a venereal disease from a Jewish prostitute and that made him hate the Jews.

Writer-director Menno Meyjes uses the former story as his starting point, but creates a much richer tableau of the social conditions in German at the conclusion of the Great War and how those conditions proved a fertile breeding ground for Adolph Hitler's ideology. Max is a provocative film and a well-made film but it is, unfortunately, an unmakeable film. The weight of its narrative can't sustain the obviousness of its construction. Max is a heck of a conversation starter, but an iffy movie.

The "Max" in the title is Max Rothman (John Cusack), a Jewish art dealer in Munich, in 1918. A former painter himself, Max lost his arm in the war and now spends his time in a massive gallery he's set up in a steel factory or warehouse. He displays work by Max Ernst and George Grosz (Kevin McKidd) and favors Modernism and Futurism. He has a beautiful dancer-wife (Molly Parker) an equally beautiful young girlfriend (Leelee Sobieski), two beautiful kids, and a fabulously decorated house. But Max came back from the war a changed man.

Max still has it better than Corporal Adolph Hitler (Noah Taylor). Hitler came back from the war poor, bitter, and homeless. He's also extraordinarily angry about the treaty at Versailles, which cripple Germany. He's remained in army barracks, doing odd jobs to live. One odd job involves bring champagne to a party at Max's gallery and the two men meet. Hitler shows Max his paintings, which are very formal black and white sketches of war scenes. Max, sensing Hitler's loneliness, encourages the young artist to get in touch with his inner rage and put it on the canvas. At the same time German army officials are encouraging Hitler to take classes in public speaking and to address meetings of some small local political parties about the plight of the German working man.

Ooops. And ooops. See, nothing good can come of the events in this film. The audience knows that, so Meyjes needs to take us on the journey in the most provocative way possible, which he mostly does.

He establishes the social world of Munich after the war. The armistice decimated the German army, bankrupted the German people, and produced the inevitable search for scapegoats. In Hitler's army circles, the blame was quickly placed on the Jews, but Meyjes depicts Hitler's hatred as pragmatic. He soaks up his terrifying ideology like a sponge, acquiring rhetoric from speeches, conversations, and a particularly nefarious piece of puppet theatre. Rothman is the embodiment of all that Hitler despises, but he's not the *cause*. That's a crucial distinction. Hitler looks at Rothman and sees his money and his family and his intellectual snobbery, but he has to mingle it with respect and, even worse, awe. For Hitler, Rothman is both the personification of the class that's keeping him down and also an entre into the artist's life that he craves. Looking at Rothman, Hitler feels driven to become an artist, but looking at the disenfranchised masses at his rallies he begins to see a different path towards power.

"Art+Politics= Power," Hitler scrawls. And that's the way Meyjes attacks the subject. Max doesn't delve into how Hitler's beliefs were developed so much as it shows how he constructed the platform for those beliefs. Working from avant garde art principles, Teutonic legends, and a Futurist vision of the world, the film shows Hitler building the aesthetic of power, the aesthetic of propaganda. And it's scary to watch.

Meyjes, a first-time director, has a confident visual sensibility assisted by some exceptional technical craftsmen. Production designer Ben Von Os establishes the necessary constrasts between Hitler's desperation and poverty and Rothman's opulent lifestyle and positions Rothman's art gallery in the middle, as poverty kitsch. Kitsch is central to the design of the film. And Lajos Koltai's cinematography is both handsome and artistic, turning the film's Budapest settings into a decent recreation of Munich.

It's Meyjes the writer who has the problems. A Dutch scribe, Meyjes has always impressed Steven Spielberg more than he's impressed me, adapting The Color Purple (an abominable misreading of Alice Walker's novel) and working on Empire of the Sun (an over-respectable taming of Ballard's book) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. But here, Meyjes is just in a tough position. The question isn't whether he *should* have written this movie, but whether anybody *could* have.

There are just too many easy traps in bringing Hitler to the screen. The problem is dramatic irony. The writer and the audience will *always* know things that the people on screen can't know and so every second is infused with that irony. "Hitler" is a name of such dark power than any time it's used, it sucks the audience out of the world of the film and ahead twenty years. Lines like "You're an awfully hard man to like, Hitler," or "Come, let's get some lemonade, Hitler," or "What we need to do is get you a girl, Hitler," become instantly post-modern. They can't be spoken seriously. But Meyjes keeps laying on the portentous dialogue. "What's his name? Hitler. I've never heard of him. You will" or "Hitler, we'd like you to speak at a rally for a little political rally for a party called the National German Socialist Worker's Party..." Any time one of these lines came up, I was sucked out of the movie and envisioned Meyjes sitting at a typewriter feeling proud of himself. Nowhere is this more true than his decision to intercut a passionate Hitler speech with Rothman praying at a synagogue. It's a writer's moment more than smart cinema.

To put it simply, you can't ever have a casual line of screen dialogue that ends in "Hitler." There are ways to avoid the historical reflexivity. One might have been as simply as having people call our antagonist "Adolph," a a name less driven by death. But that's, apparently, not what Meyjes wanted to do. Max is, I guess, not supposed to function as a straight linear narrative. It's supposed to tell a story, while constantly pulling you away from the essential frivolity of what's on screen. As bad as things increasingly get in Max, it doesn't even count as an appetizer, not even an amuse buche.

That raises a problem, then: How do you care about what's actually happening in Max when you know how things end up? The story becomes slight and speculative compared with the stories that could be told a decade later.

And, unfortunately, Meyjes has stranded the audience with a lead character who never really makes sense. Max's motives and passions and psyche remain a mystery throughout and the character isn't helped by Cusack's performance. Cusack is a master of young, ironic, contemporary everymen, but when he branches out, he has serious problems. As good as he was in Bullets over Broadway, Grifters, and Eight Men Out, more often than not, he's been ineffective in his attempts to stretch his screen persona. In Max, he only periodically lets us see him as a hollow man, but the script keeps insisting that's what he is. His line readings all have an identical bemused and ironic tone, and he's responsible for the post-modern take on Meyjes's script. I just couldn't take a single thing he said seriously, especially in his flat American accent.

Cusack is just acted off the screen by Noah Taylor, who has been giving great performances in films as diverse as Shine, Flirting, and Almost Famous. Taylor never lets Hitler becoming a caricature, but his intensity is never benign. There's an amazing amount of evil force coming out of this performance and, if the film weren't so problematic, Taylor would be quite deserving of awards recognition. Taylor is the only member of the cast attempting a German accent, though he's mostly just doing his native Australian accent with a bit of a lisp. Still, it's a logical choice.

Meyjes just has not interest in the women, though he photographs both Sobieski and Parker beautifully. Neither woman has a character, though Parker comes off a bit better than the young American actress.

There was much conversation after the movie. My friend liked it more than I did, but she seemed more willing to accept that Meyjes intended for the film to be taken at a distance. If I felt confident that every person who went to see Max would walk out and fall into intellectual conversation, I might feel better about it. It's a film that shouldn't be condemned, shouldn't be ignored, but which I also can't fully recommend.


Recommended: No