The
Believer, directed and written by Henry Bean, is the
most controversial film of the year, so any review is bound
to be misinterpreted until the reader sees the film. The story
is based on the book One More Victim by Arthur Gelb
and A. M. Rosenthal, which in turn was inspired by a New
York Times interview with Daniel Burrows, at twenty-eight
years old the number two person in the American Nazi Party,
who was suspected of being Jewish. In the film, skinhead
Danny
Balint (played by Ryan Gosling), the central character, purports
to be a Neo-Nazi Jew. In the beginning, as credits roll,
we
hear a dispute in a yeshiva about alternative interpretations
of the event in which Yahweh asks Abraham to kill his son
Isaac, with a bespectacled youth arguing that the point of
the story is not to show the benefits of faith in Yahweh
but
instead to prove that Yahweh is omnipotent and demands that
believers cast aside rationality and simply obey without
question.
The debate is presented as a paradigm for passivity of the
Jews in the face of the Holocaust, which in turn is later
mirrored in the resignation of Danny's father, an invalid
who sits at home resigned to his fate. Next, we see Danny,
some ten years after the debate with his rabbi, rough up
a
Jewish student, wearing a yarmulke, for no apparent reason
other than his hatred for Jews. Thus, we see him as a bully
even before we know what his views are as an adult. The same
belligerence is later directed toward Blacks and even toward
a daughter of a Christian fascist who wants to be slapped
around by him while having sex. Danny meets that daughter,
Carla (played by Summer Phoenix), at a soiree organized by
Lina (played by Theresa Russell). After Danny enters the
fascist's
residence, where a discussion is in progress, Danny expounds
the view that Jews should be exterminated. Yet later, when
Lina organizes a lecture for Danny, he surprises her by saying
that the way to defeat the influence of Jews is to love them
so that they assimilate, that is, for Jews to intermarry and
thereby to lose their identity. Moreover, he suggests that
Jews invented anti-Semitism to draw attention to themselves
so that they would not be assimilated. Some of the latter
views have, of course, been articulated elsewhere, including
the pages of the New York Review of Books, so what
is unusual about The Believer is that they appear
undigested in a film that can best be evaluated by purchasing
the video to show to a group, followed by discussion. Clearly,
the most profound theme that runs through is similar to Fight
Club (1999), namely, that globalization has brought
about such anomie that human needs for community and other
traditional values are no longer addressed by the major political
leaders, so solutions outside the mainstream are all that
are left. But that theme is eclipsed by endless arguments
about the contradictions of Jewish theology, including the
irrational ravings of Danny, a mentally disturbed forklift
operator who works in a fast food warehouse, envies Jews who
are rich, pumps iron to feel macho, and assaults poor people.
MH
I
want to comment on this film
