American History Blecch

By Steven I. Weiss

A young, Jewish student enters a subway train, sits down to read his chemistry book, and immediately draws the unwelcome attention of a skinhead at the other end of the car.  The skinhead approaches the student, stepping on his toes and encroaching upon his space.  After a torturous few minutes, the student leaves the train at his stop.  The skinhead follows him off the subway and furiously beats him in the middle of an otherwise empty Brooklyn street.

Writer/director Henry Bean opens The Believer with an eye-opening depiction of hate-driven violence; it is a chillingly honest scene, but, unfortunately, the only such scene in the entire film.  The Believer traces the last few months in the life of Danny Balint (Remember the Titans’ Ryan Gosling), a Jewish neo-Nazi.  The film is a very loose updating of the story of Daniel Burros, a neo-Nazi who committed suicide in 1965 after The New York Times exposed him as a Jew.

What The Believer promises is an insight into the mind of Danny and the causes behind his self-hatred.  What it delivers is nothing of the sort.  The movie treats hatred rather flippantly, giving no real context for the ingenious Danny’s mindset and writing off his entire neo-Nazi cohort as simply stupid.

In a series of flashback scenes, Bean attempts to portray the initiation of Danny’s hatred as a day school student.  Explaining the Biblical story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, Danny offers the interpretation that Abraham actually sacrificed Isaac, who was later resurrected, and indicts Abraham for having done so to his son.  Bean repeatedly returns to this scene, meant to explain how Danny came to be the twenty-something fascist that he is.  In doing so, he vastly oversimplifies the impetus that goes into a doctrine of hatred and provides no context for Danny’s supposed self-hatred.

While Danny makes reference throughout the film to the supposed sophistication of his ideas, such sophistication is never revealed.  In one scene, Danny excoriates a merry group of vandals at a synagogue for being unfamiliar with Jewish calligraphy and other ritual, screaming at them “how do you not know this?”  Assumedly, Danny has combined all his Jewish education and radical textual interpretation into the kind of sophisticated anti-Semitism that the intellectual leadership of the Third Reich attempted to cultivate.  When Danny is finally given the opportunity to explain his hatred by teaching a class to burgeoning bigots, all he can offer is that he hates Jews “because they are Jews.”  He goes on to say that “there is no word” more repugnant than the word, “Jew,” but fails to complicate his argument with anything more substantial.

Danny’s faulty logic is met with a compliment of plot-holes and puzzling moments as characters repeatedly disappear without explanation, only to reappear without explanation.  An ongoing subplot involving the assassination of an Israeli ambassador contains several of these weird developments.  In another hard-to-grasp subplot, Danny discovers that his love interest, Carla (Summer Phoenix), is engaged in a possibly-abusive sexual relationship with Danny’s mentor, Curtis Zampf (Billy Zane).  The precise relationship between Zampf and Carla is never explained, nor is the fact that Danny never confronts Zampf about it.  Here Danny’s instincts to act as a violent madman are suppressed, and we aren’t told why.

The most intriguing part of the film is Danny’s renewed devotion to a study of the Bible, which he teaches to Carla.  Gosling’s performance, impressive throughout, is most surprising as he freely engages Danny’s study in actual Hebrew.  There are some cute moments as Danny and Carla struggle through the text, but their honesty is undercut by the film’s inability to explain why they are engaging in the study in the first place, or to what ends they hope to take it.

A shockingly strange scene transpires when Danny is forced to take sensitivity-training classes in which he has to listen to Holocaust survivors tell their stories.  When the story of one survivor’s losing his son allows Danny to restate his sacrificial thesis, blaming the Holocaust’s massacres on the Jews’ inability to protect their children, one survivor makes the claim that the Holocaust transpired because of the Jews’ iniquities.  He is quickly hushed by his fellow survivors, who whisperingly urge him “not here” in a conspiratorial tone, oddly implying that the secret current of Jewish thought explaining the Holocaust is that it was, in fact, carried out against the sins of the Jews.  Disturbing.

Danny’s eventual suicide is hopelessly inconsistent with Danny’s personality and, inasmuch, is consistent with the rest of the film.  Danny’s sacrifice becomes an act of repentance and an escape from the stigma of his Jewishness amongst his fellow bigots; it is an act of supreme selfishness, and is the final abandonment that the film makes from its mission of trying to explain what self-hatred is all about.

The Believer premieres March 17th on Showtime.