The monster in ‘Max’

When “Max” debuted at the Toronto Film Festival this fall, many of us left the screening on a celluloid high, as if we’d been given a “Pulp Fiction”-sized shot of intellectual adrenaline. As People magazine critic Leah Rozen, who was also at the screening, put it: “It was so daring and theoretically assured that it was all I wanted to talk about for the rest of the night. How many movies can you say that about these days?”

On the other hand, a sizable contingent of people stormed out before the film was finished, grumbling epithets or glaring at their friends who had the nerve to stay. The film even provoked something of a family feud: My wife volunteered to make a home-cooked meal for her fellow Dutchman, “Max” writer-director Menno Meyjes, so I could interview him during a recent trip to L.A. But after watching the movie the night before Meyjes came to dinner, she icily announced, “You can have him to dinner, but you can’t stop me from poisoning him.”

Let’s just say “Max” rouses strong reaction. People regularly complain that Hollywood movies are unbearably bland and escapist, but when they see “Max” (which opens here Dec. 27), they may say, “Wait a minute, we didn’t want something that provocative!” Set in war-shattered 1918 Germany, the film chronicles an unlikely friendship between two World War I veterans, an urbane Jewish art dealer and a struggling young painter named ... Adolf Hitler.

Starring John Cusack as the fictional Max Rothman and Australian actor Noah Taylor as Hitler, the film dares to portray Hitler as a complex character -- part crafty, self-absorbed artist, part dangerously self-pitying con man. Meyjes, a 48-year-old first-time director best known for adapting “The Color Purple” for Steven Spielberg, says he was inspired by a quote from Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, who wrote, “If you want to understand Hitler, you have to understand he was an artist first.”

Filmmakers have always been drawn to artists, whose audacious, often self-destructive lives are inherently filled with drama. Meyjes can still remember, as a boy, seeing Salvador Dali strutting around in a gold lame suit at the opening of an art show in Rotterdam, “looking like Elvis, only smarter.” This fall alone we’ve already seen movies about pop artists as divergent as Frida Kahlo and Eminem as well as “Adaptation,” the self-referential saga of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s attempts to re-imagine another artist’s work. Still to come are “The Pianist,” the story of a real-life Jewish musician in Nazi-era Poland, and “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” an account of “Gong Show” creator Chuck Barris’ efforts to reinvent himself as a CIA hit man.

Of course, Chuck Barris is one thing, Hitler another. Hollywood has a long-standing love affair with serial killers, but Hitler is one murderer who remains beyond the pale. Fifty years ago Charlie Chaplin slyly lampooned the Fuhrer in “The Great Dictator,” even though virtually every Jewish studio mogul in Hollywood pleaded with him not to make the movie. Ernst Lubitsch made fun of Hitler in his 1942 film, “To Be or Not to Be,” which cast Jack Benny and Carole Lombard as a Polish actor-and-actress team who disguise themselves as Nazis to strike a blow against the evil Third Reich. And, of course, Mel Brooks had great merriment having actors audition to play Hitler for the intentionally bad musical “Springtime for Hitler” in the original 1968 version of “The Producers.”

But seeing Hitler as a figure of fun is one thing; seeing him portrayed on stage or screen as a dramatic character is something else. George Steiner got glowing reviews for his Hitler novel, “The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.,” but when it was transformed into a London stage production in 1982, the theater was surrounded by protesters. Even Steiner acknowledged that the first time he heard an actor speaking in Hitler’s voice, “it scared the hell out of me.”

The act of acting out Hitler remains a potent taboo. No one complained when British historian Ian Kershaw published his epic study of the dictator, “Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris.” But when CBS announced plans to air a four-hour miniseries based on the book next year, many people were appalled, fearing that focusing on a young Hitler before he murdered 6 million Jews would unwittingly turn him into a sympathetic character.

“Why the need or desire to make this monster human?” complained Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “Why trivialize the judgment of history by focusing on his childhood and adolescence?” Historians Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, who protested that series, have also attacked “Max,” saying that by shifting the focus to Hitler as a rejected artist, “now the story is about the personal pain Hitler endured and not the murder he unleashed across the continent.”

With all due respect, these critics should see what they’re criticizing before they get into a lather. “Max” is a movie about ideas and their consequences. The film’s dramatic conceit is rooted in historical context; some scholars believe that if Hitler had been admitted to art school in Vienna, where he was rejected twice, he would not have embarked on the Final Solution. And while Meyjes’ film makes a monster human, it’s in the service of illuminating an enigma: By making him human we have an opportunity to understand what turned him into a monster, something Hitler scholars have wrestled with for ages.

“If you feel, ‘How dare we make Hitler a human being?’ I’d say, ‘How dare we not?’ ” argues Cusack, who’s a producer on the film. “It would be nice to think that our monsters came down from a pink cloud and disappeared into fiery dust. But Hitler is real and it’s not responsible to portray history or complicated ideas in a simple black-and-white perspective.”

Crediting Cusack

Meyjes is still amazed that “Max,” which is being distributed in the U.S. by Lions Gate, even got made. He gives the lion’s share of credit to Cusack, who did the film for a fraction of his regular fee and, when the initial funding fell through, told his agents that he wouldn’t take another job until they helped find new financing for the film. “I think some of our distributors have been talked out of suicide attempts,” says Meyjes. “Even I sometimes think, ‘What have I done?’ ”

The movie’s central theme is rooted in Meyjes’ lifelong passion for art. He left Holland as a teenager in the 1970s, with his parents expecting that he would join the Dutch foreign service. Instead Meyjes went to the San Francisco Art Institute, where he learned English by copying Hemingway stories. His father took a dim view of his artistic aspirations, cutting him off financially after informing him that “you have lunch with artists, you don’t become one.”

Meyjes has always been fascinated by the artistic personality, which led to his intertwining of the two main characters in “Max,” men both under the spell, in very different ways, of modern art. It’s unnerving to watch Max Rothman’s reaction when he first meets Hitler, whom he sees not as a genocidal madman but an embittered loser who’s all too similar to the other angry, self-absorbed young artists he’s met.

“It’s the most horrible thing,” says Meyjes (who, if you’re interested, is Protestant). “Max likes Hitler! They’re kindred spirits, both scarred by this horrible war that’s just ended. Max feels he understands him. He’s trying to bring him around to the light: Come with me, get out of politics, go meet a girl and get a drunk and fall in love with life.”

What disturbs people about “Max” is that with Hitler portrayed as an aspiring artist, moviegoers could view him as an innocent, as someone whose hideous sins are somehow understandable. But for Meyjes to see Hitler as an artist is no more of a stretch than for Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal to blame Hitler’s rabid anti-Semitism on his being infected with syphilis by a Jewish prostitute. They are both explanations. Hitler often defined himself as an artist, in both the deliberately artistic design of his Nuremberg rallies as well as the totalitarian architectural visions he collaborated on with Speer. As Ron Rosenbaum writes in “Explaining Hitler,” many Hitler watchers, beginning with Thomas Mann, believe that “the heart of Hitler’s appeal to the German people was his presentation of himself as a myth-making artist rather than as a politician.”

For me, the most poignant part of the film is Meyjes’ portrait of Rothman, a man who despite having lost an arm in the war, effectively wrecking his own artistic ambitions, remains intoxicated by the possibilities of modern art. “I was fascinated by Max’s casual compassion -- he’s the classic liberal,” says Meyjes. “He knows Hitler is dangerous, but he thinks: If he only had some of my advantages, surely he wouldn’t feel so bitter and angry.

“I think this film bothers some people because they think of art as an exalted occupation, so the notion that Hitler could ever be an artist gives him too much credit. But in this movie, Hitler is full of emotional cowardice and envy and relentless self-pity. They are small sins, but it’s the small sins that add up.”

In the film, Max is the true innocent. He keeps trying to interpret what Hitler says through the context of art, imagining him as a mad, reverse futurist. “But how can you blame him?” says Meyjes. “Who in 1918 would look some at some guy who’s sleeping in doorways and ever believe that someday he’s going to set the world on fire?”

“Max” shows us more of the ugly young Fuhrer than many moviegoers will be comfortable watching, but it’s the films that make us the most uncomfortable that often stay with us the longest.

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“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.