Written by Henry Bean and Mark Jacobson
Directed by Henry Bean

Raising teenagers is tough. Even with just the so-called normal teenager adventures, it’s hard sometimes to decipher some of the crazy things they do and the motivation behind them.

Ryan Gosling is Danny Balint. At first, he seems a stereotypical character. He is lifting weights and sports a close shaved head – he is a “skinhead”. Traveling in a subway car, he finds a target in a boy wearing a yarmulke studying a book. He’s soon harassing him to the glares of other minorities on the train. When the boy attempts to escape by leaving the train, Danny follows him and beats him up.

He and his friends make their way to a meeting of those who think like them but appear less obvious. He urges the killing of Jews, blaming them for all of society’s ills. Curtis (portrayed by Billy Zane) is a fascist but is uncomfortable with the anti-semitism.

Through a series of flashbacks, we soon learn the oxymoron of the tale; Danny is Jewish. He is shown receiving religious training but thinking outside the box of what is presented that he is supposed to accept without question. It’s one thing to have a child who grows up to reject the religious training instilled in them as a child. My oldest is something like that. However, it’s quite another to take that rejection and turn it into something violent, like bombing churches.

Here, Danny has the love and affection of his family. His family life doesn’t seem inherently flawed, nor does he seem to engage in unusual conflicts with them. However, he seems to be gaining more and more status within the hate group, even being invited into the inner circle. Will the love and acceptance he feels from the hate group triumph over that of his family?

The film is well-paced and well-written. Danny is complex, and it would be easy to make him into something predictable and stereotyped. Instead, he is actually quite intelligent. He questions things, and for that, he is repeatedly punished. When he is sentenced to sensitivity training by talking to Holocaust survivors, his reaction to their stories is anger at them, rather than developing empathy. Danny doesn’t understand why they didn’t fight back against the Nazis, rather than following them like sheep into the camps and eventually the ovens.

The character of Danny was based on the true tale of a man in 1960s New York City, who was unabashedly anti-Semitic and was of Jewish heritage. Brought into the modern era, it becomes something more. It would be easy to classify it as the usual disaffected teenager film, where he finds love and acceptance among a hate group that he doesn’t find at home. However, that isn’t the case. Danny’s home life isn’t shown as being something violent nor smothering. This makes the film all the more disturbing, as parents who seemingly feel they have a bead on their child’s identity can be fooled. It also prevents the film from becoming entirely too predictable and dull.

The acting is terrific. Ryan Gosling has a good hold on Danny’s complexity. When he becomes involved with the daughter of one of his group’s leaders, it brings in another factor as well and gives Danny even more dimension. Gosling has Danny as someone who is searching for something, but he’s not quite sure what, and the answers he seems to be coming up with are disturbing.

Summer Phoenix as Carla, his love interest is another complex character, and perhaps needlessly so. She begins examining the religion at the heart of Danny’s hate, and is soon immersing herself in it in a way Danny can’t understand. Carla is also involved with Curtis, either her stepfather or just her mother’s lover, which is a needless diversion from the story at hand.

I don’t necessarily blame Billy Zane or Theresa Russell for the under-whelming nature of the characters they portray, but they seem to be accessories to the main thrust of the story. Curtis doesn’t seem comfortable with some of the aspects of what’s being spawned by the fascist group, and it even made me wonder at some points if he was a mole. I think that’s Zane coming through, though, because I don’t think the character was necessarily supposed to display that. Russell is just there to act as his counterpoint and Carla’s mother, but she is underutilized in general.

There are many things that The Believer touches on, and perhaps the best point is that questioning in religion should be treated as normal, and for religions to be more embracing of personal discovery. It’s something I have always felt strongly about, believing there are many paths to God. It would seem the religions that reject this line of thinking are also the ones that spawn the most hatred. The Believer makes the point in what I believe is entirely too subtle a manner, although it might not be looking to drive any one point home.

The Believer is not for those disturbed by the subject matter, as some will be. It’s a film that will make you think and might haunt you in ways you don’t expect. I had to view the film twice to really get a handle on it, as it’s complex while at the same time having a distinct story. It’s not something to watch as a lightweight film.


EXTRAS:

” An Interview with Director Henry Bean
” Anatomy of a Scene
” The Believer Trailer
” Previews
” Weblinks