THE BELIEVER directed by Henry Bean (2001)
Ryan Gosling’s full-blooded performance as Daniel Balint made me think of two other on-screen neo-nazi skinheads : Tim Roth in Alan Clarke’s Made In Britain (1982) and Edward Norton in Tony Kaye’s American History X (1998).
As with those characters he is lean, mean with fierce, but misguided, intelligence.
One of the aims of all these films is to show that to brand all extreme racists as thugs is simplistic and misleading.
In The Believer, Balint’s hatred of Judaism stems from what he regards as the religious abstraction. He believes Jews are too passive when faced with oppression. Having rejected the faith he was raised in, he seeks a more militant doctrine and this bizarrely leads him to anti-Semitism. We see him strutting about proudly wearing a red T-shirt with a swastika symbol and proclaiming an ambition to ‘kill a Jew’.
Balint is articulate and well-read, although in the company he keeps, even if he had scanned through a copy of ‘Fascism For Dummies’ he might have been praised as an intellectual.
In fact, from his schooling he can read The Torah in the original Hebrew and scorns his thuggish cohorts for their ignorance of the symbolism of this sacred text.
Carla (Summer Phoenix) , the daughter of a fascist group recognises Balint as more than just another skinhead on the make. When he asks why she chooses him as her lover she replies: “with you there’s a tragic dimension”.
Alex Gosling – A crisis of faith
The best parts of the movie are when Balint is in full rant mode and where the hatred towards Jews is exposed as a blind prejudice. In one great lecture he says:
“Do we hate ’em cos they push their way in where they don’t belong?
Or do we hate ’em cos they’re clannish and they keep to themselves?
Cos they’re tight with money, or cos they flash it around?
Cos they’re Bolsheviks or because they’re capitalists?
Cos they have the highest lQs or cos they have the most active sex lives?
You wanna know the real reason why we hate ’em?
Cos we hate ’em.
Cos it’s an axiom of civilisation,…..that just as man longs for woman, loves his children and fears death ..he hates Jews.
There’s no reason. And if there were, some smart-assed kike would try and prove us wrong,which would only make us hate ’em even more! And really, we have all the reasons we need in three simple letters. J… E… W.”
A conventional movie would have a plot-line in which, with a blinding flash of insight, Balint comes to see the error of his ways or, alternatively, he is stopped in his tracks by forces for good.
Director, Henry Bean and screenwriter Mark Jacobson are not interested in a story with such a neat closure. The ambiguities and contradictions are neither fully explained or resolved beyond understanding that Balint’s seemingly illogical position stems from self-hatred. The film’s title is not entirely ironic because , despite Balint’s rants against Jewishness, he cannot bring himself to reject Judaism entirely.
As an anatomy of racial hatred the movie is strong and uncompromising; but as a drama it is too contrived to be entirely convincing
Link:
