If, in his heyday, Mel Brooks had been reckless enough to make a film about the relatively young Adolf Hitler's struggle to figure out what to do with his life -- an idea that wouldn't make much of a comedy, even with some song-and-dance numbers thrown in -- he most likely would have called it YOUNG HITLER. It might have been a career suicide move, but at least something appalling or startling might have come of it.

Menno Meyjes' MAX, set in 1918 Munich and dealing with the pseudo-creative birth struggle of Hitler's political career, is too talky and sober-minded to appall anyone, but it may trigger some controversy when Lions Gate opens it on December 27th. I caught it at the Toronto Film Festival on Monday, and talked it over the next day with Meyjes and his two stars, John Cusack and Noah Taylor.

Stagey, sparely designed (necessarily, due to a small budget), and above all thoughtful, MAX is about a relationship between a fictional, one-armed art dealer named Max Hoffman (Cusack) who takes a kindly (if not completely friendly) interest in the 30-year-old Hitler (Taylor), a guarded and embittered World War I veteran who wants Hoffman to exhibit his mediocre paintings and perhaps launch his art career.

Max isn’t sure if Hitler has the talent or the honesty to become a respected painter, but, as he tells him early on, "Something is definitely rustling behind your curtain."

As it turns out, Hitler doesn’t have the moxie to put his churning feelings -- anger, a pathological hatred of Jews, and sexual frustration (women make him nervous) -- down on canvas. He chooses politics instead, or rather a blend of art and politics as a means of achieving power, which is clearly within his grasp as the film ends. The core subject, says Cusack, "is about the birth of modernism."

The beef about MAX, I'm presuming, will be over the decision by Meyjes, who wrote and directed, to portray the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century in somewhat human, as opposed to purely demonic, terms. For many in Hollywood and the mainstream media, this is a major no-no.

Witness the negative ink (such as the NEW YORK TIMES' article by Maureen Dowd title "Swastikas for Sweeps") that resulted when a made-for-TV Hitler biopic was announced by CBS honcho Leslie Moonves a few weeks ago. Moonves felt he had to reassure everyone that "at no point will (Hitler) be shown as a nice guy."

The point everyone seems to miss is that in reality, evil rarely shows its colors and always wears a becoming mask of some kind. Movie portrayals of the usual fuming, fanatical, unbalanced Hitler not only ignore this, but are boring besides. MAX, at least, tries to deal with the fact that this vicious little creep was, at heart, a human being.

Meyjes acknowledges that "of course an anti-Hitler prejudice is there. People want pure evil to be depicted as larger than life…they don’t want to see evil, particularly of this magnitude, coming from a head waiter."

As a result, he says, raising the funds needed to shoot MAX (which was eventually filmed in Budapest, on a relative shoestring) was more than just difficult. "People were hiding under their desks," he recalls. "'You and John Cusack…even your first-time director status, fine,' they said. 'We'll make anything with you…just don’t make this film!'"

Cusack gives no quarter to these Nervous Nellies, or their requirement that Hitler always be portrayed as Beelzebub incarnate. "I'm sorry to inform them that [Hitler] was human, and we'd all better take a more sophisticated view of this or we're all in trouble. At root they seem to be saying, we know he's human…but we don’t want to know he's human. We need to reject our shadow selves."

Besides, says Cusack, the early naysaying on MAX has come so far from people who haven't seen it. "I think that speaks for itself," he says, "I urge them to see it. And I challenge anyone who sees it to tell me it's not a clearly pro-human, anti-war film."

It seemed to me, I should add, that Taylor's Hitler portrayal is perhaps a little too off-putting. He looks and acts like a seething little rat, unable to express anything but fear, frustration and hostility. It makes it difficult to understand how people could have been swayed by him later on. Historians all say Hitler had charisma, and Taylor says he "was an arch and talented manipulator." But there isn’t a trace of this (and at age 30, you'd certainly expect to see the beginnings) in Taylor's version of the man.

One of the more interesting psychological theories about why Hitler turned out as he did, according to Taylor, is "the billy-goat theory," which subscribes to the notion that Hitler's feelings of 'inadequacy or inferiority began as a child "when [he] had part of his penis bitten off by a billy goat."

Neither Meyjes or Cusack had any theories as to why Hitler (or his spectre) is suddenly popping up in so many films these days. The Toronto Film Festival is currently showing HITLER'S SECRETARY, a neo-Nazi drama called FUHRER EX, and a Rod Lurie short called THE NAZI, along with MAX, on top of the four-hour CBS biopic and even Nicky Katt's comedic Hitler riff in Steven Soderbergh's FULL FRONTAL.

As WASHINGTON POST critic Desson Howe remarked earlier this week, for storytellers of all shades and particularly for filmmakers, "Hitler is the gift that keeps on giving."

Good Fellas

Michael Caine told me at a party last evening that he reads this column regularly. That in itself made my day…or night, to be specific.

We sat and talked for a half hour or so at a lavish soiree thrown by INSTYLE and the Hollywood Foreign Press. We were huddled inside a modest alcove adjacent to the main room, with QUIET AMERICAN and RABBIT-PROOF FENCE director Phillip Noyce sitting to our right and all kinds of well-wishers (Matt Dillon and Sony Classics chief Michael Barker among them) dropping by.

Caine and Noyce have taken a shine to the column, understandably, since I ran a rave review of their film, THE QUIET AMERICAN, a couple of weeks ago. I also described Caine's performance as Fowler, a morally compromised LONDON TIMES journalist covering the French Vietnamese war in 1952, as one of the best of his career and an easy Oscar contender. If Miramax honcho Harvey Weinstein decides to release the film this year, that is…which he's still apparently resisting, despite excellent notices coming from Roger Ebert and VARIETY critic Todd McCarthy, among others, following recent festival showings.

My latest information is that Harvey intends to "dump" THE QUIET AMERICAN with a release in January '03, a decision partly due to a huge number of releases Miramax already has slotted for the fall and holiday seasons. The smarter move, given the obvious quality involved, would be to at least give AMERICAN a one-week, Oscar-qualifying theatrical run in December in New York and Los Angeles.

Caine and Noyce both attended a public screening of THE QUIET AMERICAN early Monday evening at the Uptown theatre on Yonge Street. Caine described it as "wonderful, really great...I'd never seen it with a crowd before."

Readers who caught my earlier piece know the film deals with a romantic triangle between Fowler, his young Vietnamese girlfriend, and an American CIA operative named Pyle, played by Brendan Fraser. It looks at first as if the younger, seemingly more passionate Pyle might win out, but Fowler makes a cold-blooded move at the end that tips the situation back into his court. Caine told me that during the q & a after this screening, a questioner asked if THE QUIET AMERICAN should be regarded as a cautionary tale. It is, Caine answered -- the movie says "never come between a teenaged girlfriend and her 68-year-old lover."

A source close to the situation told me yesterday that before the critical raves changed everything, Miramax was "ready to let this film quietly die…that was the plan…they were putting out the word that it doesn't work. What's happened is amazing. In the last few weeks [the film has] gone from having no release date, not even one in January, to having a release date confirmed for this year on top of talk of an Oscar campaign...astonishing."

Runaround

Here are some photos taken over the last two or three days, and some self-explanatory captions. The cool shoes were being worn by Leelee Sobieski during a round-table interview yesterday for MAX. And running photos of black squirrels is kind of a Toronto obsession of mine. These little guys are fascinating. Why are they black, I wonder? Are there black squirrels in the northern reaches of New England, or upper New York State? I bagged a good interview with ROGER DODGER director Dylan Kidd earlier this week, but I'll be holding it for a while so I'm running this photo of Kidd and star Campbell Scott, taken at the FAR FROM HEAVEN party at Zoom, for now. Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno were snapped at an after-party for their French-language romantic comedy, JET LAG, that was held at some downtown club I've forgotten the name of. Boo-boo, possibly. Ozu? Hoo-hah?

Bursts

Gaspar Neo's IRREVERSIBLE, which Lions Gate has just acquired, is an egotistic, diseased, convulsive thing to watch. The problem is that it's also brilliant and shattering, although in an assaultive, show-offy way. It starts in a milieu of absolute hell, then it gets worse when a woman (Monica Bellucci) is raped in a subway tunnel, which Noe pushes right in our face for I don’t know how many minutes. The first half is without question one of the roughest sits I've ever endured. The much warmer and more humane second half allows for a breath of fresh air, as well as a dawning realization that there may be more to this thing than was initially apparent.

Joel Schumacher's PHONE BOOTH is okay, nothing more. A bit less than that, actually. Colin Farrell is strong and fascinating as a disingenuous, bullshit-artist New York publicist who realizes while making a call in a phone booth on Eighth Avenue that an assassin is watching his every move, and if he tries to leave the booth he'll be shot. The stand-out element is the fact that the bad guy has an ethical point, as Kevin Spacey's serial killer did in SEVEN.

David Cronenberg's SPIDER is one of the most exquisitely composed films to ever emerge from this adventurous Toronto-based filmmaker. It will also, I suspect, get good reviews from the ivory-tower, off-the-ground critics who tend to praise filmic art without much regard as to whether Joe Sixpack will be interested, or whether he might at least be persuaded to give this or that art-movie masterpiece a try. In this small, crass, insignificant arena (the selling of tickets...God, I'm such a philistine!), SPIDER is utterly and categorically doomed. It's an unregenerate art-house downer. I can't say I actually "liked" it, but I was enthralled by the high-level craft and exactitude that Cronenberg invested in it. Ralph Fiennes (who, by the way, is losing his hair, which isn't good for a supposed heartthrob-type), Miranda Richardson, Gabriel Byrne, John Neville and Lynn Redgrave costar.

Paramount's THE FOUR FEATHERS has some okay action scenes, but some of the motivations used to sell their necessity don’t add up or make sense. Overall, it doesn’t deliver its Big Observation about warfare (soldiers fight to take care of each other) as sharply or with the same flair as the one delivered by Zoltan Korda's 1939 version (war is ghastly, and men who brag about their war heroics at the dinner table are fools). Heith Ledger's nose is too round and squashy-looking for him to be convincing as a 19th-century Englishman, and he looks dreadful in a short haircut.

Universal is pissed at me for having reacted more expansively to last Sunday's screening of 8 MILE than they expected (I had something shorter in mind myself -- sometimes the spirit just takes you), even though I was 90% positive about it. They'd requested a no-review agreement from every critic who came to the showing, but I always maintained it was fair to write something in response, especially considering it was a public screening to which tickets had been sold. The beef, then, is about the length and/or scope of my reaction, not that I reacted, per se. I've always agreed that shorter is better. I'm wondering why Universal brought 8 MILE to Toronto in the first place. They spent tens of thousands of dollars and flew their crew in and dealt with all the headache of a major film-festival showing for….what? To sense reactions?

THE EMPEROR'S CLUB, an ethical prep-school drama in the vein of DEAD POET'S SOCIETY and SCENT OF A WOMAN, showed today at Toronto's Uptown, so it's okay to finally write about it. It stars Kevin Kline (whose Hollywood nickname used to be "Kevin Decline" because of all the offers he turned down) as a priggish ancient-history professor who discovers that a certain bad-seed student, the arrogant son of a U.S. Senator, has cheated in a major academic competition, which Kline is persuaded not to report. 20 years hence, this student – now a captain of industry who’s planning to run for the Senate – invites Kline to preside over a follow-up match between the same competitors, and Kline makes another disturbing moral discovery. He discovers that he's not the star of THE EMPEROR'S CLUB, but THE OMEN, PART 5: THE TRIUMPH OF DAMIEN. The lack of subtlety and cardboard characters in the OMEN flicks (yes, even the original with Gregory Peck) have been emulated by EMPEROR screenwriters Neil Tolkin and Ethan Canin, and by director Michael Hoffman. This makes two crappers in a row for Kline, after last year's LIFE AS A HOUSE.

Clutch

Variety reporter Charles Lyon had a traumatic experience during a Monday afternoon showing of his short film, THE GHOST OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, at the Varsity 8. As soon as it began running at 3 p.m., Lyons instantly realized there was not only no sound, but that the projectionist wasn’t doing anything about it. Lyons says the film ran a full ten minutes until somebody finally contacted the guy in the booth and got him to shut it down and see what was wrong. It turned out that the device that reads the optical soundtrack on the film wasn't working and that a new one had to be sent for. Lyons explained the problem to the crowd and asked for their patience. Everyone stayed, he says, even though the problem wasn’t fixed until 40 minutes later.

Yeah, Baby!

I just thought I'd run this one-sheet for Alexander Payne's ABOUT SCHMIDT because it's an especially shrewd and clever one. Obviously the opposite of a standard Hollywood glamour shot, it tells you right off the bat that SCHMIDT has integrity. It's selling a kind of grumpy, fuck-it-all cool. It also tells you it's about a guy whose life has stalled and is having trouble getting it going again, which is more or less what it's about. Congratulations to New Line marketing director Russell Schwartz and his creative team for definitely doing something right.