Even the most serious, sophisticated moviegoer must at this point cringe at the prospect of yet another earnest, artful, terribly well-intentioned Holocaust movie – let alone two of 'em – subtly inserted into limited release in the midst of holiday season, just in time for Oscar consideration. Nevertheless, "Max" and "The Pianist," both flawed but ambitious projects, contain enough unprecedented elements to make them worthy of attention, if not enthusiastic endorsement.
That's particularly true of "Max," already controversial for allegedly encouraging sympathy for The Devil with its portrayal of Adolf Hitler as a struggling artist in Munich immediately following World War I. Noah Taylor, who made an indelible impression as the younger David Helfgott in "Shine," brings the future Fuehrer to twitchy, self-pitying, neurotic life as a brilliant, outrageously opinionated, imperfectly washed and anti-social loner. He strikes up an unlikely relationship with Max of the title, a charming, witty Jewish art dealer who happens to be a fellow decorated veteran of the gruesome fighting on the western front.
As played by John Cusack in perhaps his most intelligent and impressive performance to date, Max Rothmann tries to adjust to the loss of his right arm in what he now considers a pointless conflict, but pities the snarling, friendless Hitler who, he assumes, may have lost even more. In a sprawling factory floor he's converted into a trendy gallery, Max shows the daring artists of the day (Georg Grosz, Max Ernst) and urges Adolf to "go deeper" – to express his rage on canvas, rather than trying to market his polite, bourgeois images of landscapes and dogs. At the same time, some of Hitler's contacts in the army want him to express that seething fury in rabble-rousing speeches against the humiliating peace agreement just negotiated at Versailles.
Writer-director Menno Mayjes (a Dutchman who worked with Spielberg on the scripts of "The Color Purple" and "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade") gives surprising vitality to his central conceit: that if only Max can help Hitler find expression and power through his painting, then he will feel no need to turn to politics. After all, Max argues, which is more important, "to teach the world a new way to see, or to help decide how to spend taxes?"
Chain-smoking, wry, diffident but driven, Cusack makes his anti-hero utterly irresistible, despite that character's delusions about the liberating power of modernism and his flagrant cheating on an adoring wife (the under-used, miscast but lovely Molly Parker) with a smoldering mistress (Leelee Sobievski). Since Hitler's resentment of Max's situation intensifies over the notion of polluting an Aryan maiden with his frivolous philandering while married to a respectable Jewish Hausfrau, it doesn't help that few actresses read less Semitic on screen than the lithe, snub-nosed Molly Parker (none of the leading actors are, in fact, Jewish).
In any event, the movie rises and falls on its portrayal of the future dictator, and "Max" makes you believe that this peculiar, intensely unpleasant little man with the greasy, lank hair could indeed transmogrify into the murderous monster who ultimately bestrode the world. Far from promoting identification with Hitler, the movie makes clear that long before he became a beast regarding issues of earth-shaking importance, he qualified as a twisted, wretched piece of human refuse on the little things of life – as all the biographies confirm. The magic in this movie involves its ability to portray this pettiness and ugliness at the same time it conveys the sense of dark power waiting to be unleashed.
The major problem in an audacious piece of cinema, veritably pulsating with possibilities, involves the pat and manipulative ending, which makes a gallant but inevitably doomed attempt to elevate sentimental pathos into tragedy. This overly-ingenious twist, complete with distractingly flashy cross-cutting, may deliver a visceral impact, but discerning viewers (and a discerning director) ought to know better. The show-offy cleverness proves unworthy of the electrifying energy of what's gone before, in which the wholly fictional Max and the historical Adolf both crackle into the consciousness with similar authenticity (THREE STARS, Rated R for tough language, discreet sexual content and some brutal violence near the end).
In Roman Polanski's "The Pianist," it's a few gorgeously realized scenes, rather than vivid characters, that make the deepest impression. This is a far more conventional Holocaust movie, beginning with the Nazi invasion of September, 1939, and a well-to-do Warsaw Jewish family, confidently predicting that the Allies will protect Poland and that all the danger and unpleasantness will soon blow over.
Polanski (himself a childhood escapee from the death camps) portrays step-by-step degradation with elegant, even unforgettable detail; the superb camera work by Pawel Edelman suggests "Schindler" in an earthy, full-color palette of often Rembrandtesque moodiness.
Adrien Brody appears in virtually every frame of film as the title character, an esteemed virtuoso with Warsaw Radio whose pianistic artistry as a Chopin specialist gives way to an increasingly elemental, even bestial struggle for survival. Herded with his previously privileged siblings and parents into the crowded, starving ghetto, he's removed from the deportation column and separated from his family just before boarding the cattle cars by a guilty guard who means to save his life. The movie then drags on as he hides in one lonely location after another, scrambling for food just a step ahead of starvation, occasionally aided by sympathetic Poles, watching the doomed Warsaw Ghetto uprising from a window but afraid to leave his hiding place.
In its final 15 minutes, this elegiac, always impressive enterprise becomes significantly and suddenly more compelling with the unexpected appearance of an apparently sensitive German officer (Thomas Kretschmann). Encountering the bedraggled, emaciated figure of the hero, this clean-cut Aryan superman asks about his pre-war career and learning that he is – was – a pianist, orders that he play. Moved by the sounds of Chopin, he considers helping the terrified refugee stay alive during the last days of the war. Or is it a cunning maneuver to assure at least one positive witness to the officer's humanity after the inevitable Allied victory?
Polanski's strength as a director in all his best films (most of which he created more than 20 years ago) often stems from his eye for telling detail, and here he deploys that faculty with devastating impact. He provides a brief, fleeting glimpse of the handsome family photo on the German officer's desk; a vision of a desperate Jew in the ghetto, attempting to rob a pot of stew from a female passerby, only to knock it to the ground where he shamelessly licks the spilled mess from the pavement. Views of the thorough, lunar-landscape, surreal devastation of once bustling Warsaw, strike with apocalyptic force through the masterful use of computer-generated imagery.
To its credit, "The Pianist" focuses on the unparalleled suffering of Polish Jewry without slighting the simultaneous (if less comprehensive) horrors suffered by Polish gentiles. Working in his home country for the first time in nearly 40 years, Polanski and his cast seem to carry this tragic history with bone-deep immediacy and no trace of Hollywood flash or sizzle.
But the absence of artifice also involves an absence of shaping artistry, so that the long experience of misery shared by the viewer bears an exhausting aura of purposeless pain. "The Pianist" (based on the memoir of real-life musician Wladislaw Szpilman) bears witness effectively, even eloquently, but it's hard to argue that moviegoers with so many competing demands on their time must treat this movie as a prime priority. The unique status of the hero (so soulfully played by Brody, a legitimate Oscar contender) as a master of music comes through in only a few random scenes in a long, sprawling, intermittently rewarding film (THREE STARS, rated R for frequent, unremitting scenes of almost indescribable brutality).
The appearance of "Max" and "The Pianist" at the very end of 2002 raises legitimate questions about Hollywood's agenda. Despite the fact that both titles involved independent productions far outside the entertainment industry mainstream (in one case relying almost entirely on European talent and financing), fans of the imperishable "Jews control the media" conspiracy theory will see some purposeful exploitation in two new views about the last century's most celebrated mass murders.
Never mind that Menno Mayjes isn't Jewish, or that Polanski never before involved himself in Jewish-themed material in all his long and varied career in Poland, the U.S. or Europe. Neither film mentions Zionism or Israel in any way, so the relevance to current controversies remains subtle or non-existent. Moreover, the Jewish characters on screen – like the over-privileged, adulterous "Max" or the degraded, feral, denizens of the ghetto in "Pianist" – hardly qualify as the sort of one-dimensionally noble victims who might serve some propagandistic priority.
In fact, the Holocaust continues to draw the attention of talented filmmakers because the vast, limitless nature of the pain and the evil continue to challenge the artistic imagination. The big question isn't the continued presence of Hitler's inferno as the focus for motion pictures, but the continued absence of Stalin's similarly horrific inferno, which clearly cries for comparable attention. Perhaps in years to come Hollywood will overcome its stubborn, almost incurable left-wing bias to provide cinematic treatment on an appropriately grand scale to the silent tens of millions, slaughtered by communist butchers in two dozen nations – armies of the innocent dead who have yet to enter public consciousness through the agency of popular culture.