Speculative biographies are a risky business, particularly when it comes to a
figure of such enormous historical consequence as Adolph Hitler. Writer Menno
Meyjes (THE COLOR PURPLE, THE SIEGE) makes his directorial debut with just
such a project: a fictionalized imagining of Hitler's life as, in the
aftermath of WWI, he attempts to establish himself as a painter while
refining the ideas that would later infect a nation. Were the two related?
Munich, 1918. Germany's humiliating defeat in the Great War has stirred deep
discontent among the populace, at the same time it excites new currents in
modern art. Artists such as George Grosz (Kevin McKidd) are bringing the
brutal truths of the battlefield to bear on the everyday horror of modern
life, and forward thinking Jewish dealers, like the wholly fictitious Max
Rothman (John Cusack), are bringing these new works to the people. It's
shortly after an opening at Rothman's gallery that he first encounters the
30-year-old Hitler (Noah Taylor), a hollow-eyed veteran who's been skulking
around Munich with his portfolio of postcard paintings tucked under the
tattered arm of his Army issue coat. The penniless, would-be artist has been
bunking with his garrison, which has become a festering hotbed of wounded
nationalistic pride and virulent anti-Semitism. Most of Rothman's circle find
Hitler repellent, but the dealer is sympathetic to his fellow soldier —
Rothman himself is a frustrated artist who lost an arm on the battlefield
— and he encourages Hitler to break through his parochial ideas about
art and tap into what's deep inside. Ironically, Hitler's army captain
(Ulrich Thomsen) is encouraging him to do the same, but for a far darker
purpose: He sees in
Hitler the blazing eyes and rabid mouth of a fanatic, and urges him to
unleash his inner anti-Semite to become the spokesperson for a frightening
new future. Meyjes's received a firestorm of prerelease criticism from
critics who feel it's somehow indecent to treat Hitler as a human being with
a past, as if it's easier to cope with inhuman monsters who sprang fully
formed from some mythic darkness than with monstrous men. That's nonsense.
But what does make the film disturbing is the way in which it positions
Hitler as a mere mouthpiece for what was already in the air, a role he was
convinced to play after suffering one disappointment too many at the hands of
Jews like Rothman. If only Adolph had been encouraged to paint his pictures,
the film comes dangerously close to suggesting, 10 million
might not have died. --Ken Fox
