Conflicted and confused
The Believer is a gripping tale of self-hatred
It's hard to believe the outrageous premise of the smart indie hit The Believer, although the Grand Jury Prize winner at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival is based on a true story.
In this complex, troubling portrait of massive self-hatred, a former yeshiva student raised as a devout Jew becomes a right-wing neo-Nazi.
Director Henry Bean's inflammatory portrait of self-loathing in the extreme features a gripping performance by Ryan Gosling as the conflicted skinhead, Danny Balint. Bean and co-writer Mark Jacobson (a former writer with The Village Voice) based Danny on real-life American Nazi and Klansman Daniel Burros, who committed suicide in 1965 after The New York Times published an article that revealed he was Jewish.
Bean's provocative character study is a picture of an antihero as compelling in his hatred and, also, his vulnerability, as Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle. Neurotic weakness, chest-beating masculinity and self-hatred all interlock in Danny's tormented worldview, which sees society's anomie and moral relativity as a Jewish "invention," an at-times justified rant against some of the crimes of postmodernism repackaged as anti-Semitism.
In flashbacks to Danny's yeshiva school days, Bean shows the boy's simmering rage at the religious teachings of Judaism. His fundamental issue is that of a bright, iconoclastic teenage boy outraged over the perceived passivity of Judaism. "All the Jews are good at is being afraid," wails Danny before he is ejected from the classroom by his furious teacher.
The Believer opens with a heart-pounding scene of Danny stalking his psychological double — a Jewish student his own age — and then beating him into a heap on a deserted New York street. Danny screams, "Hit me!" as he beats the student, demonstrating his outrage at the perceived weakness and passivity of his victim.
Danny's rage is the rage of an individual rebelling against convention, but in the most masochistic terms. Not surprisingly, Danny is drawn to a woman as conflicted and obsessed by Judaism and power as he is. Carla (Summer Phoenix) lives with her mother Lina Moebius (Theresa Russell) and boyfriend Curtis Zampf (Billy Zane), a pair of posh uptown fascists, also impressed by Danny's intelligence.
Bailing Danny and his pals out of jail after a racist brawl, Carla promptly asks Danny to "hurt me" in a bizarre response to Danny's equally twisted request that the Jewish student he stomped "Hit me!"
If Danny's confused anger and passion makes the either-or, black-and-white dander of fashionable types stand on end, the screenwriters' most cynical invention is Carla, a woman who translates politics and culture into fashion like the Cabala-crazed Madonna. The masochistic, brilliant, boho Carla dabbles in Judaism because she lacks anything of comparable depth and meaning in her own life, and she is drawn to the exoticism of Judaism.
Carla tells Danny of her attraction and that sex with him has a "tragic dimension." And The Believer would be nowhere without the compelling miasma of Gosling's emotional conflicts, which allows the film to rise above a freaky storyline into the realm of tragedy. Gosling's portrayal of Danny and his soured, percolating insides is absolutely intoxicating. Wiry and lean, Danny is the prototypical skinhead until his face collapses into itself and reveals a raw, heavy torment. To their credit, Bean and Jacobson have gone to great lengths to make Danny's anti-Semitism rational and highly charismatic rather than reducing him to a pop-eyed, slobbering madman more amenable to P.C. tastes.
And in making Danny so sympathetic in his suffering and confusion, director Bean of course forces his audience to come to terms with issues of anti-Semitism and Zionism, Israel nationhood and the Holocaust. Bean does not afford viewers the easy out of simply condemning Danny, but forces an often uneasy contemplation of the issues of contemporary malaise, interlocked with Danny's anti-Semitism.
Brimming with hate for the Jewish faith, Danny also wipes away tears as he listens to a Holocaust survivor recount the murder of his 3-year-old son. The incident becomes a touchstone for Danny, an enraging illustration for him of the passivity of people who stand by as their children are murdered. Danny replays that seminal story again and again from myriad angles, turning the incident into a personal myth that only serves to articulate the conflicts of emotion and intellect battling for his soul.
Rather than be weak, as Danny sees the Jewish "condition," he decides to ally himself with the "strong." Though, in another of the complicated flip-flops of this meaty film, the "strong" here are a bunch of marginalized kooks, angry kids with acne and self-loathing malcontents who scatter in disorganized bullying. Carla's home life is typical, with intimations of incest, mental illness and suicide giving rise to this post-nuclear family of political fascists. Conflict defines The Believer and the film is all the better for it.