Movies
Max
Into an old, dark, dank, dripping, abandoned train depot, hung with German Expressionist art, barges someone who promptly throws up. "George!" calls out the debonair host. "So glad you like it!" You know right there that this is not going to be a very good movie. (Menno Meyjes, writer and first-time director.) "George" turns out to be the painter George Grosz (pronounced "gross"), and his host turns out to be the one-armed Jewish art dealer and would-have-been artist, Max Rothman (John Cusack), who will befriend a bedraggled and angry young man by the name of Adolf Hitler ("You're an awfully hard man to like, Hitler, but I'm going to try"), and will even bestow a benign label onto his visionary artwork: "Future-kitsch." It is not inconceivable that a Portrait of the Young Hitler as an Artist could have had a certain wrong-end-of-the-telescope curiosity, though it would have demanded a stronger Hitler than that of the London-born Australian actor Noah Taylor (The Year My Voice Broke, Flirting, Shine), whose speech is sprinkled with alien colloquialisms such as "chaps" and "lads," and whose gargling oratorical style barely comes up to the eloquence of Donald Duck. 2003.
— Duncan Shepherd
Reader Rating:
- MPAA Rating: R
