Blood in the Face
The Believer attacks neo-Nazism with pulp fervor
In the cinema-fist opening of Henry Bean’s The Believer, a yeshiva student sits on a crowded subway when a skinhead marks him as a Jew. The student tries to get away, but the skin kicks and flattens him, daring him to fight back. Then, in a flashback, a young schoolboy attacks his rabbi’s interpretation of the sacrifice of Isaac; the issue, the kid says, isn’t Abraham’s faith but God’s power: “I’m everything and you’re nothing.” It’s only after witnessing this that we realize the student on the subway is not the grown-up schoolboy. The skinhead is.
Winner of top honors last year at Sundance, and subsequently shunned by gutless major distributors, The Believer concerns a Jew and a Nazi locked in mortal combat within the same divided soul. It’s based on a 1965 New York Times account of a Klansman who concealed his Jewish heritage. The Klansman, in Bean’s telling, morphs into Danny Balint, a modern-day neo-Nazi who joins a nascent movement of namby-pamby fascists. Their nominal leader (Billy Zane) soft-pedals anti-Semitism, saying it “won’t play” to enlightened newbies. Danny knows different. He advocates killing Jewish leaders. Then he goes home to his Hasidic neighborhood in Queens.
Danny may be pushing Semitic self-loathing to its absolute extreme. He may be working to force hatred of Jews into the open, and not even know it himself. As writer and director, Bean offers no easy answers. The Believer is raw, gun-to-your-head pulp melodrama, and that keeps it honest. It’s too artless and angry to attempt armchair psychology—this isn’t American History X, in which one trumped-up trauma causes racism and another cures it. Instead, the film seethes like Danny with an active intellect that leads to terrifying places. Being a good Jew, Bean suggests, makes Danny an even better Nazi—keenly able to articulate why he despises the Other. “Know your enemy,” Danny replies, when his goon-squad buddies wonder why he knows so much about the Torah.
Danny himself is fascinatingly unknowable. Ryan Gosling plays him with such vehement conviction that he sounds reasonable if you don’t listen to what he’s saying. But as Danny’s inner contradictions spread further apart—as he seeks out his former synagogue while plotting to blow it up—Gosling gets the freaky, sunken-eyed stare of a man whose head is splitting. Eventually, it does. Even then, his final act is ambiguous—a slaying of the dragon that doubles as a rebirth into calculated martyrdom.
Bean’s direction doesn’t have the sardonic fury of his writing, but The Believer is complex and wounding in ways that are rare for American movies. Danny Balint’s soul mate is a character in Samuel Fuller’s 1963 film Shock Corridor: a black student who internalizes so much racial hatred that he imagines himself a Klansman. Like Fuller, who spent his career probing the schisms of the American psyche, The Believer uses pulp to express our endless indigenous capacity to reinvent ourselves—often as our worst enemies.
—Jim Ridley
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