Dir. Menno Meyjes
Aka the Hitler-as-starving-artist movie. I was afraid that Max would postulate a simplistic spurned-artist-turns-evil point of view, but it turned out to be more complex than that. Hitler (Noah Taylor) is shown as always possessing the evil ideas that he later channeled into murder - his idea of blood purity is chilling with or without the dramatic irony of knowing what happened next. This film was tied up in controversy because of the fact that it dares to show human aspects of Hitler, but I think that’s what makes Hitler’s evil even scarier.
“Politics is the new art”, Hitler says at one point, and the question of the link between art and politics is particularly interesting here because the whole combination of Hitler and art makes me think of the aesthetic-but-evil films of Leni Riefenstahl, and indeed, of Riefenstahl’s categoric refusal to acknowledge any wrong doing. Max Rothman (John Cusack), with the artist’s eye, sees the kitsch in Hitler’s attempts at art (we are shown a terribly kitschy drawing, of a dog), and the art in his plans for Germany - the autobahns, swastika, eagle motif all are Futurism by way of retreat into Teutonic symbols. It struck me that the film suggests quite a non-Enlightenment view of the world, in suggesting that some ideas are best left unvoiced: Max (John Cusack) the aesthete asks Hitler to search for an “authentic voice”, but that search turns out to uncover - or unleash - the evil within the Austrian corporal. (This whole non-Enlightenment thing is perhaps fitting, since the Second World War probably marked the death of a belief in the inherent goodness of progress.) The chilling part about Max I feel is that it shows Hitler as being willing to turn on and off his rhetoric - that to him his speeches are purely aesthetic, words in the ether, even though, as the film shows, his incitements to hate have a very real physical result. Hannah Arendt’s quote on the “banality of evil” comes to mind here.
Random notes: John Cusack, as always, is superb. Top on my list of Hollywood actors I would most want to be. Hmm. Being John Cusack. I always thought it would be interesting if the sequel to Being John Malkovich was Being John Cusack, and then Part III would be Being Whoever-Was-the-Lead-in-Part-II. And so on and so forth.