Also this issue:

And So To Bed
Christopher Nolan's Memento follow-up isn’t as memorable.
-Cindy Fuchs

Trouble Every Day
-S.A

repertory film

Thrilling
-S.A

Screen Picks

May 23-29, 2002

movies

Saving Faith

TORAH DE Force: Danny (Ryan Gosling) contemplates the error of his ways.

The Believer is a searing look at self-hatred through the eyes of a Jewish neo-Nazi.

The Believer

by Sam Adams

The BelieverWritten and directed by Henry Bean A Fireworks Pictures release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse

RECOMMENDED

Playing a skinhead has become almost a rite of passage for young tough-guy character actors -- from Russell Crowe to Tim Roth to Edward Norton, they shave their locks, hit the gym, sit still while the makeup artists paint on a few tattoos, and scowl their manliness into the camera, getting off on the persona while ostensibly deploring it. Henry Bean’s The Believer takes that implicit premise and runs with it. The film’s main character, Danny (Ryan Gosling), is so seduced by the power and certainty of neo-Nazi ideology that he becomes a rhetoric-spouting anti-Semitic zealot, and this despite that he’s Jewish.

Rather than casting its hero as an inarticulate, brooding mass, The Believer makes him a misguided intellectual, so what comes out of Danny's mouth is not just a stream of invective (though there's some of that as well), but actual arguments, many of them based in the Torah that he studied as a child. In flashbacks scattered throughout the movie, we see the young Danny (Jacob Green) denounce God as a "conceited bully" and a "power-drunk madman," and not without a trace of envy. Though writer/director Bean (Internal Affairs) never exactly explains Danny's strange conversion, the movie scatters references to the familial problems typical of ultra-right-wing cannon fodder. At a compound in the woods where he and his fellow Nazis take target practice on a wooden caricature of a Jewish family, he's asked which one he was aiming at, and Danny replies, almost sheepishly, "Father."

Working in a heightened verbal, if not visual, style, Bean stages his tale with tabloid immediacy, which helps gloss over some of the implausibilities in the story, among them the existence of an assimilation-oriented fascist movement led by the schoolteacherish Curtis Zampf (Billy Zane). But any doubts are erased by the charismatic mania of Gosling's performance; like David Thewlis raving about the apocalypse and UPC symbols in Naked, Gosling puts repugnant ideas across with such force that you're almost tempted to believe him -- at least until he stops talking. The Believer is unabashedly bold and provocative, but never exploitative; as much as Danny's rants are its most disturbing feature, the pain in Gosling's eyes is its moral center. Even the tortured twist into a pat (if undoubtedly necessary) ending doesn't undo the complexity of Bean's creation. The Believer trusts its audience to fill in the blanks, and it has the energy and fire of a thousand easy lessons.