The Believer

I have to agree with Ashtarcommand; what a very strange film. And what is everyone else going on about?! There is no real explanation of why an apparently intelligent young Jewish man should revolt against his religion, culture and people to the extent he starts consorting with some pretty dopey neo-nazi types and wants to start killing other Jews. And then he's so clear in his new ideals that he gets upset at his new mates despoiling the Torah when they go in to blow up a synagogue!! So he takes a copy home and then starts teaching his neo-nazi girlfriend all about it. Oh, along the way one of his new found buddies discovers he's a Jew, but neglects to tell anybody else for some unknown reason. And then he starts going to synagogue again with his old school friends while still plotting to blow them up!!!!!!!!! Extremely mixed up.

Towards the end of THE BELIEVER, I mused on the similarity of the film to the 1975 screen production of THE MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH starring Maximilian Schell. In the latter, Schell stars as a reclusive, wealthy, Jewish, Manhattan industrialist, Arthur Goldman, who (apparently) has used his connections and financial resources to create the fiction that he's a former Nazi prison commandant, a fabrication (apparently) leaked to the Israelis. Without knowing this beforehand, It comes as a surprise to the viewers and Goldman's associates, but not to Arthur himself, when he's kidnapped (as was Adolf Eichmann) and removed to Israel to stand trial as a war criminal - on display in a glass booth wearing full Nazi regalia. Schell is stunningly powerful as the concentration camp survivor who goes to extremes to exorcise his personal guilt at having outlived the Holocaust, and what he sees as the collective guilt of his people for not fighting back.

In THE BELIEVER, Ryan Gosling is Danny, an incredibly intelligent, literate and articulate 22-year old who spends his days as a neo-Nazi skinhead preaching hatred and expressing the desire to kill Jews. His activities run the full gamut from planting bombs with a group of like-minded, mindless thugs, to fund raising in a suit and tie for an upscale Fascist organization. The thing is, you see, Danny is himself a Jew with deep emotional ties to his heritage.

It's perhaps an over-simplification to say that Danny hates Jews. Rather, he hates the message that Orthodox Jews preach, i.e. that Jews are but the pawns of God and must be submissive to His will - even to the point of abject pacifism in the face of the most extreme persecution. Danny is not, nor has ever been, submissive to his religion and its appointed teachers. He doesn't loathe his Jewish self so much as the thought that his religion automatically makes him a submissive creature. Basically, he wants the Chosen People to fight back. This is evident early on as he savagely beats a meek, yarmulke-wearing teenage boy while screaming, "Hit me! Hit me!" Moreover, he figuratively shakes his fist at God, daring Him to strike him dead for his rebellion.

At one point, Danny asserts that the Jews are naturally a wandering people thriving on the prejudice they encounter, and that the Israeli's have risen above their Jewishness because they now have a land to call home. Since the Israeli's are aggressively militant in their own defense, it seems to me that Danny might just as well be a staunch Zionist. Why he isn't is a mystery. But, no matter, because Gosling, like Schell, is stunning as a guilt-ridden and psychologically tortured individual seeking inner peace. While the film's conclusion is the ambiguous sort that invites extended coffee house discussion, it's evident that Danny goes to an extreme to find it. And the very last dialog that is heard, "There's nothing up there", leaves an aftertaste of the nihilism that Danny suspects is true.

I had seen the Believer at the cinema, and have recently seen it again in DVD. This movie had left a strong impression on me, and the feeling has been confirmed after watching it again.
It is the story (inspired by the true story of a certain Daniel Burros) of a young Neo-Nazi Jew taken in the net of contradictions between his religion/roots and his antisemitic ideology, between the quest for meaning and self-hatred. One might have feared clichés and simplistic psychology, but none of these in that movie. The actor (whose performance some newspapers rightly compared to De Niro's in Taxi Driver) perfectly incarnates this young man undergoing a metaphysicial crisis -- a rebel rejecting his roots and religion, but prisioner, despite himself, of his own identity, which will constantly catch him up.
Metaphysical questioning and very interesting reflexions on judaism makes this movie powerful, thought-provoking and excellent (careful though : several violent scenes).
The non-manicheistic, quite existentialist end brings more questions than answers and illustrates the inner questioning and complex / yet coherent psychology of Daniel, the protagonist.

In short, an intense and powerful movie, that I strongly recommend. Let me quote the words of Mr Maurice Samuel (a Jewish author) which echo Daniel's own questioning and self-destructive behaviour :

". . . we Jews,
the destroyers, will remain the destroyer forever. . . nothing that the
Gentiles will do will meet our needs and demands".

When it was released, the Believer didn't find a film distributor in USA, and remained confidential there -- given the anti-Hollywood treatment of the subject, this is no surprise. Yet the film was released in various European countries and Israel as well. It won the Grand Jury Prize in Sundance Festival in 2001.