What a fine actor John Cusack is. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a really bad movie I’ve seen him in; he graces even the not-so-fabulous ones with good performances.
His strongest asset is his face, which always seems to convey a kind of melancholy wit, whatever else it is being called upon to do. And the best part of that face would be his extraordinary eyes — deep and dark and liquid eyes that exude intelligence as well as seeming to contain a veil of irony. Cary Grant (especially in his movies for Alfred Hitchcock) was the last actor able to do comedy or thriller or both while maintaining such a delicate ironic balance.
Cusack’s style perfectly suits Max, a sort of historical fantasia by Dutch-born writer-director Menno Meyjes. It plays with hitherto unexplored possibilities as Tom Stoppard did in Travesties, where James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Lenin meet. Max is set in Munich, 1918. The German army has just staggered home from defeat in World War I. A humiliating peace treaty is about to be signed at Versailles. That treaty would, of course, provide a reservoir of resentment just right for the rhetorical manipulations of Adolf Hitler. In Max, Hitler (an excellent Noah Taylor) is still a twitchy foot-soldier, fresh out of the horror of the trenches, and an aspirant artist; Cusack’s Max is a rich-boy art-dealer who is everything Hitler both despises and wants to be.
Agonised but conventional in style, Hitler is not exactly Max’s kind of artist. Nor is Max Hitler’s kind of dealer: he’s spikily modernist, showing work such as the bilious satire of George Grosz. “Next time I have diarrhoea,” Hitler scoffs at Max, “I’ll take a shit on the canvas and bring it around.” Coolly, and with only a slightly arched brow, Max replies, “You could do worse.”
And yet a kind of rapport develops between the two, one built on Max’s inherent kindness (despite his Weltschmerz and his own artistic frustrations) and on Hitler’s need for any kind of affirmation of his meagre talent.
The ironies here are multiple: the conflicting views of what art is and what it should do in its social context; the complex way Max and Hitler represent different combinations of hope and despair; the way Max, as a rich Jew, represents civilised humaneness, while Hitler will come finally into his own as an artist when he develops his fascist project with all its carefully styled iconography. It is, of course, too simplistic to see Hitler’s will to power as compensation for his failed artistic career (though many have done that), but there is something there, on a deeper level — something to do with self-esteem and how that links to Germany’s post-Versailles humiliation. Hitler’s great promise to the German people was the restoration of pride.
Max is not a history lesson; it is too knowingly anachronistic for that. But it is an inspired divagation on history, art and personality, with sparkles of wit that glitter, like Cusack’s eyes, all the more brightly for the blackness of their historical setting.