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The Best of Both Worlds
David Waghalter, Los Angeles
 LIZ HEDGES |
Would you pay to see A movie called "The Jewish Nazi"? If you were in the business, would you help create such a film, or stick your neck out to get it into theaters? Such a provocative title might generate the publicity needed to draw an audience, but it would run the risk of offending potential viewers at the same time.
Filmmaker Henry Bean changed the name of his directorial debut to the less hit-you-over-the-head "The Believer." Yet the film still can't seem to shake the cloud of controversy that has loomed over it since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January.
"The Believer" follows a young skinhead named Danny Balint (Ryan Gosling), who enjoys tormenting and fighting with people of all colors but whose real passion is hating Jews. When asked by a right-wing organizer what his strategy would be for kicking off a new fascist movement in the U.S., he responds without hesitation: "Kill Jews." But Danny is no mere thug - he's brilliant, he's articulate and, unbeknownst to his fellow racists, he's Jewish.
Despite his self-hating, anti-Semitic worldview, Danny cannot fully free himself of his Jewish spirit. While vandalizing a synagogue with some newfound comrades, he is surprised to find himself still awed by the power of a Torah scroll. He also becomes reacquainted with some friends from yeshivah, even joining them for Rosh Hashanah services. To top it off, he begins to teach Hebrew and Torah to his gentile girlfriend (Summer Phoenix), the daughter of a local right-wing leader. They attribute these secret lessons to the principle of "Know Thy Enemy," but their devotion to learning betrays a deeper passion.
The film has its roots in a true story. Daniel Burros was a nice Jewish boy from Queens who somehow went from being his rabbi's star pupil to a hotheaded proponent of the long-defunct Third Reich. After a stint in the army, he became involved with the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan. In 1965, following Burros's arrest at a KKK event in New York City, the New York Times disclosed that he was Jewish. Hours after the paper hit the stands, Burros took his own life.
But that episode was only a jumping-off point for veteran screenwriter ("Internal Affairs," "Enemy of the State") and first-time director Bean. "I'm not writing the Daniel Burros story," Bean told The Jerusalem Report. Indeed, "The Believer" bears only a passing resemblance to the book "One More Victim," A.M. Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb's lengthy investigation of the Burros case: The central character of each is named Danny, is a Jew hiding his religion in a hate group, and has his religion "outed" by a New York Times reporter.
When he first heard of him 25 years ago, Bean was struck by the fact that Burros sometimes exposed certain superficial aspects of his true identity to his Nazi buddies, like serving knishes and consorting with women whom his friends said looked Jewish. "What captured me about this story [is that it is] about a person who insists on being a living contradiction, on being a thing and its opposite," says Bean. The celluloid Danny's Jewishness is expressed in much sharper terms: He uses his knowledge of the laws of kashrut to argue with employees of a delicatessen, he tries to persuade his fellow skinheads not to destroy a Torah scroll, and, as his Jewish consciousness begins to awaken, he fashions a crude version of tzitzit to wear beneath his clothes, a stunt that almost gets him killed.
Bean's own connection to his Jewish roots was strengthened when he met his wife, screenwriter Leora Barish ("Desperately Seeking Susan"). Bean, 55, grew up with limited Jewish knowledge but, thanks in large part to Barish, the daughter of a rabbi who was a career U.S. army chaplain, now keeps a kosher home and occasionally delivers a dvar Torah at the Conservative minyan he attends in Manhattan. Still, he does not label himself observant. "I practice my Judaism in my way," he says.
With a religious dimension added to the script, Bean's obsession with the story came to a head when a professor friend asked for some material his students could film. Bean delivered a few pages, and was inspired enough by the scenes produced to put up $500,000 of his own money to film a full version. The final budget came to $1 million, (supplemented by a producer he had worked for as a screenwriter), but thanks to the veteran cinematographer Jim Denault and a searing performance by relative newcomer Gosling ("Remember the Titans") in the lead role, the movie looks like it was made for easily 10 times that.
The film was received warmly at Sundance, America's foremost independent film showcase, winning the Grand Jury Award, the top dramatic prize at the fest. But not everyone has been as enchanted by "The Believer" as the Sundance judges. A review in the trade magazine the Hollywood Reporter takes the director to task for the views some of the characters express: "It ...is unsettling to listen to any movie that wallows in obscene anti-Semitic slander with little attempt to balance these tired accusations with any rational challenge. Perhaps Bean assumes that his audience holds a proper point of view. That's a dangerous assumption in today's world."
Bean, of course, feels this is preposterous. "Myself, I think the film is so overtly philo-Semitic that it's a little embarrassing," he asserts. "When I set out to make this picture, one of the aesthetic principles I aimed for was a perfect balance between Danny's character's hatred and love for Judaism. I don't think it comes out that way. I think it pretty much obviously tips toward the 'love' side."
As for possible negative reaction, Bean is not worried. He realizes that some people think that "Anything you say that might give ammunition to the enemy, or that speaks aloud those things we don't talk about - that's bad. A lot of the older Jewish groups have an attitude like we're still living in a dangerous situation. And while there's always a truth to that - look, we have too long a history to be totally sanguine - I think there's a benefit to speaking like you're unafraid even if you're not completely unafraid."
The views Danny espouses in the film are necessarily extreme, because the story must establish his character at one end of the spectrum in order to heighten the tension when he tries to balance his tendencies toward the other. Some of the views expressed by Danny and other characters are run-of-the-mill anti-Semitic canards: Jews control the media, world finance, etc. But Danny also comes up with some novel ideas about his own people: The Jews undermine society at large through their tendency to use wordplay to reduce important issues to the point of absurdity; and they undermine traditional moral values through sexual perversity, a label Danny applies to oral sex, among other things.
HOW DID BEAN COME UP with a believable worldview for a Jewish anti-Semite? "I looked into my own heart," he says with a laugh. "I'm a Jew....but it's easy for me when I think about Judaism, at certain moments, to see how it might look to the anti-Semite. I simply tried to come up with the best argument against the Jews that I could come up with myself."
Perhaps due to the opinions expressed in the film, Bean has had trouble securing a theatrical release. In at least one case, he says, a potential distributor was frightened off due to possible responses to the film's subject matter. "I think they were afraid that if there were an organized reaction against [the film] by some of the Jewish groups that it might affect some of their more expensive and important products." The risk didn't seem justified.
The general topic of hate groups has been covered on the screen in recent years, most notably in 1998's "American History X." While that film generated its own amount of controversy, it featured then-up-and-coming star Edward Norton, hot off his Academy Award-nominated turn in "Primal Fear," easily enough of a draw to allay the fears of bottom-line-oriented distributors. While "The Believer" features Theresa Russell ("Black Widow") and Billy Zane ("Titanic") in small roles, it does not hold the kind of star power likely to increase the "potential upside" in Bean's equation.
The story line of the earlier film also might explain why it met with little resistance from distributors, despite its overall subject matter. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, second in command at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, notes that in "American History X" the lead character, the violent skinhead Derek Vinyard, changes his evil ways, allowing the picture to "reach out and teach people something." In "The Believer," however, "We don't find out what makes this guy tick. ...If you don't have that element, but do have the graphic violence, it's not a film that works," says Cooper, who has seen both films.
(Recent articles in the Los Angeles Times and the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles suggest that Bean is "livid" about Cooper's speaking to a potential distributor, Paramount Classics, about the film. Cooper maintains that he spoke with Paramount only after they called him. He stresses that there was in no way a movement by the Center to boycott the film or affect it in any other way. "Our job is not to be the thought police," Cooper told The Report. He also points out that officials at the Center only saw Bean's film in the first place at the director's request.)
To be fair, the two movies are related only on the surface. Both are about the young men who fuel contemporary hate groups, but "American History X" is a rumination on the nature of hate - what induces it and what can reverse it - while "The Believer" is an examination of a personality torn by two extremes.
On viewing the film, one is hard-pressed to deem it provocative at all. The extreme views are voiced only by extremists; that is, the movie makes no attempt to suggest that such views are either main-stream or acceptable in any way. The reason that the movie contains no explicit response to Danny's rants (save for one brief scene dealing with his views on Israel) is because none is needed, Hollywood Reporter notwithstanding. Do we really need someone to tell us that killing Jews is bad?
That said, some scenes in "The Believer" are difficult to sit through. The film opens with Danny savagely beating a young yeshivah student as he taunts him to "Hit me back!" and includes a graphic depiction of a group of skinheads desecrating a synagogue. But neither scene is gratuitous: The former introduces Danny's brutal nature while at the same time giving the audience a glimpse at what's eating him, his shame at the notion of Jewish passivity. The synagogue scene is pivotal in kindling Danny's rediscovery of his Jewish soul. Audiences may be shocked to see a Torah being desecrated, but they shouldn't need a disclaimer stating that "No Torahs were harmed in the making of this film" - it is, after all, only a movie. (In fact, Bean used passages from the Torah that do not contain God's name, photocopying them onto parchment-like paper to create the prop.)
Danny does not renounce his dark side, but rather tries to embrace both worlds - Jewish and racist - at once. For Bean, this is the essence of the story, which is really about "the complexity you have in your feelings about the things closest to you. ...In the latter course of the film, [Danny]'s happy, he gets to be both things. I think that's what's driving him." Nevertheless, Danny's hatred is never celebrated, and his inability to let it go proves to be his undoing.
In fact, although Danny remains confused about his true self throughout the film, his love for Judaism does shine through in certain moments, especially when he is tutoring his girlfriend Carla in certain points of halakhah. And Bean lets other characters articulate various Jewish views as well. For example, the rabbi of the desecrated synagogue tells a reporter about the mystical nature of God. In one especially touching moment, a question about lighting candles for Yom Kippur becomes a discussion about theology and the nature of mitzvot. "Maybe He commands it whether He exists or not," Carla says, channeling Bean's appreciation of the philosophy of Yeshayahu Leibowitz.
In the end, audiences will have the chance to be the true judges of the controversy: "The Believer" will likely appear on the Showtime cable network in September. The cable run will be followed by a limited theatrical release in the United States and Europe. Israeli audiences will have their turn as well; the film has been invited to show at the 2001 Jerusalem Film Festival, to be held at the Cinematheque in July.
As for provocative material, Bean isn't backing down. He hopes to make more films about extremists, ending up with a trilogy about fanatics in the religious, political and artistic spheres. But he might be lightening up in his approach. His next film, he insists, will be a comedy.
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