The Believer
***
Cinema
Releases - December 7, 2001
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. 98
minutes. Directed by Henry Bean. Written by Henry Bean; from a story by Mark
Jacobson. Starring Ryan Gosling, Summer Phoenix, Glenn Fitzgerald, Theresa
Russell, Billy Zane.
Danny struts around the streets of New York City
wearing a swastika T-shirt, accompanied by skinhead buddies. He attends fascist
meetings to remind the participants to put an emphasis on anti-Semitism.
He starts a fight with a waiter in one kosher diner, and pulls a gun in another.
And he is Jewish himself.
The kid is frustrated by his upbringing -- so
frustrated that he spews hatred and feels violent urges running through him
like electricity. He hates the circular logic and finicky dogma of the Torah,
and how it seems to be irrelevant to God. He hates the weakness of his people,
how ineffectual they were in the face of the Nazis, how they seem to have
adopted persecution as a badge of identity for no other reason than to feel
sorry for themselves.
He expresses admiration for the Third Reich, but
he doesn't seem like the type of guy who would have been at home in Nazi
Germany. One scene in "The Believer" shows us an attack on
a synagogue, where Danny starts getting annoyed at how his thug companions
start ripping up sacred scrolls and playing with offerings for the dead.
Danny might be out of his mind, but he is not mindless. He despises the Jewish
religion because he agrees his are the chosen people and the God of the Old
Testament is real -- and he's appalled at both the people and the God. A
flashback shows him arguing with his primary school theology teacher; a classmate
accuses Danny of being a non-believer, and he responds, "I'm the only one
who does believe! That's the problem!"
"The Believer" is based on a true story; there
really was a Jewish kid involved with a neo-Nazi group a few years ago, who
ended up killing himself when the New York Times revealed his true identity.
In the movie, the character has echoes of Edward Norton's role in "American
History X", with his gift for rhetoric and frighteningly well-thought arguments,
which are based on vindictive logic, not hot air.
There is a moment in a diner that rings especially
true, when Danny veers between intelligent objections to the Jews and a bizarre
tangent about the perverseness of fellatio. What we see here is the fundamental
irrationality of someone who would translate ideology into
violence.
And Danny sure is violent. "The Believer" does
not merely tell us the story of a boy with far too much anger, but follows
him as he sniffs around the training camps of fellow right-wing nuts, daydreams
about assassinating Jewish leaders, and carries out several bombings on local
Jewish shrines.
Danny is played by Ryan Gosling in a performance
of incendiary intensity, and the power of the acting comes not through his
ranting and ranting voice, but through his eyes, which really make us believe
that all this conflict is going on his head. The love, the hate, the violence,
the pure frustration.
"The Believer" is not a great movie. The structure
does not do full justice to the material, and almost every time Danny gets
violent, director Henry Bean goes over-the-top, introducing sudden blasts
of double-drumbeat synthesiser music that sounds like Adam and the Ants crossed
with the score from "Mississippi Burning". Still, "The Believer" has some
fascinating and terrifying aspects that simply demand attention -- the screenplay
offers a complex premise and delivers on it in thought-provoking ways; the
gritty, cheap photography encourages a certain gut reaction; and Gosling's
performance is one of the best of the year. There is fire
here.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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