Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

I don't remember how I got introduced to this movie but had the rare urge to order it from ebay after reading a review of it that got me interested. I read that "The movie has stirred some concerns that humanizing Hitler may desensitize us to his historic evil." I think that idea is preposterous. First, the movie does not really humanize him much. And secondly,I think we SHOULD be asking questions such as what Hitler might have become under other circumstances. It also touches on questions about how art was impacted by modernity, how Hitler could be viewed as sort of a piece of performance art that embodied many of the forces at work in History, at that time. There were some good performances, especially by the young Hitler. I found John Kusack convincing only half of the time. Unfortunately, the story and script wanders. None of the ideas are developed. I find the persona of Rothmann, a fictional character, distracting from the questions about Hitler, and those questions about Hitler keep me distracted from caring about Rothmann.

A chance meeting. A relationship develops, and the art dealer Max Rothman (John Cusack) tries to direct the rage of Adolf Hitler (Noah Taylor) into painting.Would things have turned out differently? Is it possible to see the humanity of Hitler, knowing what we know? An interesting premise for a film, but can we put aside our feelings and consider the possibilities?Hitler was an ascetic. He didn't smoke, drink, or fool around. How could he find emotion to put into art, when he hasn't lived? He was caught up in the injustice of winners and losers, and wallowing in self-pity, looking for someone to blame.Rothman was playing against the Army, who were looking to stoke the same anger in Hitler. They wanted another war after the shame of Versailles. Hitler managed to put the two together and create a new art - politics. He found his scapegoat in the Jew. The irony of the ending was incredible.

Someone named holmest-2 entered a user comment fraught with claims of inaccuracies in the film Max. Holmest-2 is most certainly the inaccurate one; I find it implausible that this person has even read a full biography of Hitler unless he includes Mein Kampf as an accurate portrayal of Hitler's life. In the excellent biography The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler (by James Cross Giblin), his life as a destitute street person is described. He tried to make it as an artist, was aided by a Jewish art dealer, was known to ramble about various political subjects in the day room of his government paid housing unit. Hitler captivated no one at the beginning. He was, indeed a pathetic loner, who would be befriended and then disappear as if to never get to close to anyone. For several months he was actually living on the streets of Munich. He was also painfully terrified of women and could only idealize them, yet not speak to them. Whatever holmest-2 said about Hitler's life in the immediate post WW 1 era is just plain wrong. To me the film showed Hitler as I had envisioned him in his lost years before he found his voice, his talent, and his vicious, evil inhuman purpose.

This film mirrors Hitler's own speaking style in the way it jumbles the truth, weaving fact with fiction in such a frustrating blur one can only respond to what it says by blurting emotional responses at the screen. In Ian Kershaw's exhaustive study "Hitler", and quite fully supported by the semi-autobiographical "Mein Kampf", we find that Hitler had already been a struggling artist (and had given it up) long before the outbreak of World War One, had a fully developed political agenda rife with anti-Semitism which was the Zeitgeist of the day(feeling of the times), and was hired by the military to give oratory in the public parks because of an already well developed talent for his anti-Jewish harangues. His talent for the diatribes was noted by the army because his comrades in the trenches had become sick of listening to the endless vitriol and had complained to higher-ups "that he wouldn't shut up". All the qualities that Hitler is portrayed by this film to have developed in some form of crisis while deciding between art or politics, this artistic flair for polemics, had already taken shape many years before. In "Mein Kampf", one reads from Hitler's own pen that the question of whether the Hasidic Jew he encountered "was a German" arose when he was in Vienna, which was about 10 years before the start of World War One. Curiously, Hitler himself was not a German either! There are many anachronisms in this film. One merely has to see a German military greatcoat of the era in a photograph to know that what Hitler was wearing was probably some Canadian military surplus of WWII. The rest of the costumes were very anachronistic as well, looking like the costume manager just rummaged through the neighborhood Sally Anne for old clothes. For instance, in 1918-1919, at formal gatherings people still wore top-hats. Hitler wore a top-hat to his inauguration in 1933! Collars were higher on the neck, sports coats had belts in the back at least, if not in the front too, and the leading edges of coats had round or tapered edges not square. The houses were decorated in a fashion not seen until Ikea came along, arc-welding, cars, and on and on. Some of the coarse language by Max's women friends can be seen to be out of place as well.Although all of these inaccuracies turn the film into a "what if" scenario, it still scores a few points with its implied assertion of Hitler's sexual dysfunction and the interesting proposition that if Hitler simply got laid at an earlier age his interests in life may have been diverted away from murder and imperious expansionism. But then again, he may simply have been a happily married despot. One tends to forget in these deep studies of Hitler's mind that it required an equally disturbed national psyche to follow him into the abyss that was Nazi Germany.When we examine Germans and the question of Nazi Germany with any truth, we see an advanced people much like ourselves, and so the examination should become one of introspection. People incorrectly try to pick apart the mind of Adolf Hitler looking to pin all the blame on a curious freak of nature, forgetting the influence of Nietzsche, and the thousands of anti-Semitic publications of the era. The moral, missed by the authors and so hard for the history re-writers to accept, is that we are all capable, given the correct circumstances, of becoming Nazis.