It wouldn't be prudent for the head of the Shoah Foundation to humanize Hitler. Still, he told his protégé he couldn't and wouldn't touch Max.
Meyjes has a deal with Steven Spielberg's production company, and the Schindler's List director loved the script.
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The making of Max is a story full of similar tales: Meyjes, whose father had been in a prisoner-of-war camp, and producer Andras Hamorai, a Hungarian Jew whose mother and grandmother barely escaped the concentration camps by hiding in a neighbor's home, could find no funding for their film. Hey, it's just a book.īut such reactions to Max were to be expected the filmmakers would have been disappointed, most likely, had their movie slipped into theaters without the attendant controversy that turns novelties and oddities into box-office sleepers. The Anti-Defamation League accused Meyjes of making a film that was "trivializing" a horrific man and downright "offensive" in The New York Times, columnist Maureen Dowd damned Max and other Holocaust-centric films as glamorizing the "lifestyles of the Reich and Fascist."Ībout Frederic Spotts' book, nothing was said. "There is no moral justification for making such a movie," read the JDL Web site. "Not only is the film in bad taste, it is also a psychic assault on Holocaust survivors and the entire Jewish community," said the lobby organization's spokesman, who had only heard of the movie but not seen it, an entirely too familiar pattern among the so-called enlightened who would denounce art on a rumor. In May, long before it debuted at Toronto in September, the Jewish Defense League demanded that Lions Gate Films, which is distributing Max, put the thing back on the shelf and leave it there. It is hard not to giggle at a film in which John Cusack's Max Rothman, a German-Jewish art dealer who encourages Hitler to dig deeper and find an "authentic voice," tells the future Führer, "C'mon, Hitler, let me buy you a lemonade."īut well before its release, Max was greeted by anything but the sound of titters. Meyjes, a directing novice whose screenwriting credits include The Color Purple and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade's story, has fictionalized the historical record he did his research and filled in the estimable blanks with speculation, theory, distorted fact and nutty dialogue. Taylor plays Hitler as you imagine he might have been in those gray Munich days after the first World War-as a grimy miscreant, a glowering nobody who is all scowl and a shock of dark hair limply obscuring beady eyes. In Max, the would-be "Bohemian aesthete" of which Spotts writes is portrayed by Noah Taylor, best known for roles in such films as Almost Famous and Shine. "Repeatedly, throughout his career," Spotts writes, "Hitler complained about having to sacrifice his artistic interests to the burdens of governing." Somehow, he managed. I would have become an artist or a philosopher." In the end, of course, his was the fine art of annihilation he would use Europe as his canvas and the blood of millions as his paint to build a monument not to himself, he insisted, but all of Germany. "If someone else had been found, I would have never gone into politics.
"I became a politician against my will," Hitler often said.
Meyjes' film and Spotts' book say essentially the same thing: Adolf Hitler was a reluctant dictator, a potentially insignificant man who wanted only to spend his life painting but turned to politics when he discovered wanting to be an artist and being an artist were not quite the same thing. Just as writer-director Menno Meyjes' Max was premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, Overlook Press was shipping to bookstores Frederic Spotts' Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics.