THE BELIEVER ------------
Danny Balient is a Swastika-wearing skinhead who gets the attention of intellectuals Curtis Zampf (Billy Zane, "Titanic") and Lina Moebius (Theresa Russell), leaders of a sophisticated NYC white supremacist group, with his revolutionary plans that begin with the murder of a prominent Jewish liberal.
Invited to their upstate camp, he becomes the dominant member of the group of thugs they've enlisted, but the anti-Semitic experiences he has in that company touch off a conflict within the young man, who is himself a Jew, in writer/director Henry Bean's 2001 Sundance Film Festival winner, "The Believer."
Ryan Gosling ("Murder by Numbers"), winner of the Best Actor award at that festival, gives a searing performance as a highly intelligent young man whose early, unanswered questions make him turn from his religion and his people. Henry Bean's thoughtful screenplay provides no easy answers, but offers a compelling investigation of faith versus intellect.
An undercover New York Times reporter who witnessed Danny's speech at Zampf/Moebius home cold calls Danny at home and confronts him with his Jewishness. Danny meets him and delivers an impassioned, eloquent diatribe against the Jewish culture, whose men he proclaims female and whose legacy he notes as communism (Marx), infantile sexuality (Freud) and the atom bomb (Einstein). Bean exposes the roots of Danny's beliefs with flashbacks where Danny as a young Talmud scholar defies his teacher's explanation of the story of Abraham, with its cruel God and traumatized supplicant.
After a melee in a Jewish delicatessen, the gang is sentenced to meet with a group of elderly Holocaust survivors. One man's story about a Nazi killing his two-year old with a bayonet provokes taunts of inaction and weakness from Danny, but the story gradually merges with Danny's own memories until his own father stand in for the man and he himself is the Nazi solider, therefore killing himself. He has become the cruel God, and the conflict tears him apart. Danny's final act embodies that conflict and Bean appends a fantastical rumination of that conflict - purgatory on a never ending spiral staircase.
Because "The Believer" premiered on cabler Showtime, Ryan Gosling has been robbed of a Best Actor Oscar nomination. His performance is of that caliber, reminiscent of Ed Norton in "American History X," but blessed with stronger material.
Summer Phoenix is Lina's daughter, Carla Moebius, a mixed up kid who's sleeping with her mother's lover and gets off on violence. Her curiosity about the Jewish scrolls and artifacts Danny lovingly keeps (under the guise of knowing his enemy) guide her towards the religion and begin to soften her character.
Drake (Glenn Fitzgerald, "Forty Days and Forty Nights") is a silent sharpshooter who becomes alleged to Danny after a head-butting display of dominance. He'll become the agent of a horrified Danny's thoughts, Danny's own golem.
Zane's character is underwritten and the actor does little to flesh it out. Russell is her sexpot daughter's opposite, a buttoned up Aryan ideal who shrewdly assesses those who would forward her agenda.
Bean based his screenplay on the true story of a Jewish Klan member. He does a masterful job examining the possible roots of such a conundrum, although he's less successful defining the characters that surround his lead except as providers of Danny's opposing inclinations. Jim Denault's cinematography ("Our Song") overuses the close-up, almost predisposing the film's television premiere (of course, the subject matter was the primary hands-off factor for theatrical distributors). Original music by Joel Diamond
gives the film discordant punctuation.
"The Believer" gives one faith that American independent cinema can still be provocative.
B+
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