There’s a sinuous, creepy feel to Menno Meyjes’ movie “Max,” set in post-WW I Germany and centered on the relationship between young Adolf Hitler (Noah Taylor) and fictional Jewish bon vivant art dealer Max Rothman (John Cusack). Meyjes surrounds this odd twosome with a dark worldview and a landscape that’s weirdly artificial: an objet d’art version of 1918 Munich with art galleries built in cavernous railroad stations and interiors swarming with relics of Bauhaus and Dada. Against these backdrops, he shows a friendship that seems perverse only because we know what’s coming. This Austrian painter and Wagner devotee will bring on the Holocaust; this Jewish sophisticate will be doomed by the ascension of the very artist he tries to patronize. R.
