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. Continue reading
