The premise of The Believer is enough to make Jewish audiences scratch their heads and clutch their hearts. A brilliant Jewish boy is kicked out of Hebrew school for saying some not-so-nice things about God, his anger bubbles up like a bowl of psychotic matzoh ball soup, and years later the boy is a neo-Nazi skinhead.
The Believer, a controversial independent film by director-screenwriter Henry Bean, was inspired by the story of a New York Ku Klux Klansman who committed suicide in 1965 after The New York Times revealed his Jewish heritage. Beyond that, The Believer is pure fiction and a fascinating movie.
Ryan Gosling, a little-known stunner, plays Danny Balint, a psychologically troubled young man in modern-day New York City. Audiences first meet Danny on the subway as he sneers at an Orthodox Jewish student immersed in a thick text. After some intimidating jostling on the subway, cue-ball-headed Danny stalks down the Jewish youth and beats him badly.
Sporting a fire-engine red swastika T-shirt, Danny is soon showing off his smarts at a meeting of new age fascists. Led by shaggy-haired Curtis Zampf (played by Billy Zane, the bad guy from Titanic) and creepy, constipated-seeming Lina Moebius (Theresa Russell), the group is trying to go mainstream, soft-pedaling their anti-Semitism.
But Danny rejects the kinder, gentler approach to fascism. “The modern world is a Jewish disease,” he rants, in the first of many self-loathing diatribes, and he pitches the couple a plan to kill “rich, successful, brilliant Jews.”
At this point audiences will be all but screaming: “What is Danny’s problem?!” They won’t have to wait long to find out. Danny heads home to his ailing, Jewishly observant father, and the flashbacks start pounding like angry hail. As a nebbishy boy, we learn, Danny challenged his religious-school teacher on the true meaning of the binding of Isaac. In Danny’s eyes, God sent a clear and cruel message to Jews that day: “I’m everything and you’re nothing.”
Rebuked by his teacher for maligning God, the frustrated boy shouts, “I see him for the power-drunk madman that he is. And we’re supposed to worship such a deity? I say never.” We see nothing beyond that fateful day in the classroom, when Danny is ultimately expelled from class for his hubris. But it is clear that his critique of God’s dominance over the Jewish people continues its chokehold on his mind. He sees it in every aspect of Jewish life: the oppression, the self-deprecation, and most importantly in the Holocaust. He is disgusted at the European Jews for what he sees as their failure to fight back against the Nazis. “All the Jews are good at is being afraid,” he declares.
Danny’s disgust leads to hatred, and he embraces violence as a physical refusal of Jewish passivity. But watching Danny, one can’t help but notice he is really a Jew in skinhead clothes. Danny can’t purge himself of his Jewish knowledge, his years of study, and his love for Judaism’s ancient texts.
As much as he longs to fight with his fists, Danny belies his carefully constructed skinhead persona by fighting with his mind, a Jewish tendency he endlessly attacks. He leads his group of neo-Nazi hooligans—all of whom seem to be missing brain matter—into a kosher eatery just to heckle the waiter. The thugs order chicken with cheese. When they are refused, Danny quips, “It says in the Bible you don’t steep the kid in its mother’s milk. But chickens don’t give milk.”
lthough The Believer won the Grand Jury prize at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, it was panned by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-based organization that combats anti-Semitism, and initially had trouble finding a theatrical distributor. So it was decided that it would instead premiere this past fall on Showtime. But after September 11, the film’s broadcast was postponed because of its subject matter.
The inventive screenplay by Henry Bean—himself an observant Jew—however, does nothing to elevate the status of neo-Nazis, as some might worry. When Danny begins spouting Jewish vocabulary words, claiming that he is studying his enemy in the manner of Adolf Eichmann, his moronic friends are stumped by his reference to the Nazi leader. Unlike Danny, whose tortured relationship with Judaism takes an entire movie to explain, his buddies seem to preach hate only because the nearest pinball machine was out of order.
In the film’s most controversial scene, the skinheads are at their savage worst. They attempt to rig a local synagogue with explosives, and have a field day urinating on the pews from the balcony and brutally ripping a Torah scroll. The Wiesenthal Center’s Rabbi Abraham Cooper called the scene “problematic and disturbing.” This is no understatement. But Danny’s unexpected reaction to the desecration—guilt, anger, revulsion—is what makes The Believer so special. In this deeply provocative moment, the film succeeds in articulating the way Judaism can seep into some souls so deeply that no estrangement can ever bleach it out.
Besides Gosling, the one other standout in the film is Summer Phoenix, as Mobius’s unbearably beautiful daughter Carla. A masochist, she is drawn to Danny’s surface brutality. But like Danny, she possesses an inward, defiant intelligence. When she asks him to teach her Torah, to learn what she presumes to hate, he happily complies. Soon she too is consumed with Judaism. But what Danny is repulsed by, Carla is strangely drawn toward. “Being nothing, not mattering,” she says, when he catches her lighting Sabbath candles, “what if that’s the best feeling we can have?”
Ultimately, it is Carla who elicits tenderness from Danny and makes it possible for audiences to care about him. While his motivations may not be entirely plausible, Danny’s quest to make peace with Judaism is absorbing, right to the heartbreaking end.
