Max

Newsnight Review discussed Max, written and directed by Menno Meyjes.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

PAUL MORLEY:
I like the idea that we have a film about art and ideas, compared to some of the perfumed shit we get from Hollywood. It's interesting there should be a suggestion that, I mean he was an artist. If he had been a butcher, we would have been talking about the fact that he was. But they used to say he was an artist, so we have to engage with that thought. It's fascinating the thought he was so repelled by cubism. Surrealism, impressionism. That what he ended up doing with a grotesque form of performance art. It's a difficult thing to engage with. But it's worth having a go at. Viewing the film as a comedy, I loved it. I loved the way Cusack called him Hitler all the time. When George asks him who's this guy you're mixing with, he says "he's a futurist". When George says he hasn't heard of him, Cusack says "you will". I enjoyed the idea that he gave art an idea a sense of how powerful it could be that the person most opposed to the rise the modernism, went on to do what he did. Also that art is the beginning of advertising.

KIRSTY WARK:
What about John Cusack's performance with Noah Taylor. The problem is that you are thinking that this is Hitler and the fictitious problem that Max never existed did that bother you?

JEANETTE WINTERSON:
No, not at all. I like that. I think it works well with the film. But my difficulty with it is not the bravery of the premise, I am pleased that people are looking at him like this. For me, the problem is that Americans seem to think that at any period in history, people talked, acted and thought the way Americans do now. So you have 1918 Germany talking about things on the sidewalk. This is a struggle.

TOM PAULIN:
What worries me about this is it comes out of a new climate of revisionism, Copenhagen, for example, looks at the fallible human being The man is a blank, a void, it would have been somebody else. It's the people who supported him. The forces that created him that count. It leaves out everything to do with the republic, the struggles at that time after the First World War. All of that is out the window.

KIRSTY WARK:
But we have to surely have to strive to understand?

TOM PAULIN:
We understand social and economic forces.

JEANETTE WINTERSON:
But human beings are behind social and economic forces¿

TOM PAULIN:
No, no, no! Social and economic forces are behind human beings¿

JEANETTE WINTERSON:
No, it's got to be the other way around!

TOM PAULIN:
They are shaped by the forces, that is it. It's important for everybody to make no compromise with Nazism, not to understand it in a touchy-feely way.

KIRSTY WARK:
Do you think it's touchy-feely?

PAUL MORLEY:
No, I don't think is so. I thought it was more subtle than I had been led to think that it was. I thought it's not Nine Hours, I thought maybe it was a pilot for a rich sitcom.. But this was taking a slither, the possibility, because he was so rejected by the art world he unleashes this.

TOM PAULIN:
This is nonsense. It's like the idea that if Lenin's elder brother had not been hanged by the Tsar there would be no Russian revolution.

JEANETTE WINTERSON:
I think that the human element has to be included.

TOM PAULIN:
I don't believe in it!

JEANETTE WINTERSON:
But I do, that's why we disagree!

PAUL MORLEY:
I like the what ifs, it is a good what if movie.