Danny uses his swastika like a blunt weapon. Walking through the city streets, he flashes a t-shirt bearing the symbol's crooked fingers at a couple of passing black men--his eyes grin with sadistic glee when they recoil in outrage. Danny beats up a young Yeshiva student and vandalizes a synagogue with a group of skinhead punks. But at home he sheds his clothes, like a bizarre Superman, to reveal a talis--a Jewish prayer garment--and Danny begins to study Torah.
Danny is no punk--he's a neo-Nazi Jew, the title character of the powerful and uncompromising film The Believer. It premiered last Sunday on Showtime in a run that lasts through the end of the month, and it will be given a limited theater distribution in May--more than a year after it beat out unusually strong competition for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Now, after distribution troubles and scheduling conflicts with the forces of history, The Believer has finally completed its long and difficult pilgrimage into the light of the public eye.
The film had been in utero for two decades, ever since writer and director Henry Bean (Deep Cover, Internal Affairs, Enemy of the State) first came upon the story of Danny Burros, a Jew who rose in the early '60s to be King Kleagle of the New York Ku Klux Klan. Burros committed suicide after being exposed by The New York Times, yet the revelation couldn't have been much of a surprise: Danny brought knishes to his Nazi friends and openly dated women who were 'obviously Jewish.' Such is the stuff of Jackie Mason or Woody Allen jokes--indeed, Bean found the story to be 'darkly hilarious' and conceived of a film that would be a black comedy.
Bean's captivation with Burros would take form only upon his own rediscovery of Judaism. He married the daughter of a Conservative rabbi, a deeply educated woman who had become estranged from the faith. Bean was the opposite--having been Bar Mitzvahed in 'the most rinky-dink fashion,' he was drawn to the religion despite his ignorance of it. He soon found a 'tremendous vitality' in Judaism that allowed room for such doubt and contradiction; The Believer was born out of a fusion of this newfound appreciation for halacha (Talmudic law) with the fascinating paradox of Danny Burros (renamed Danny Balint, in the film).
It was perhaps inevitable that The Believer would meet with both controversy and success at Sundance. Bean, seeking approval from the Jewish community, showed the film to the L.A.-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, a human rights organization focused on Holocaust issues. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean at the Center, objected to the film and voiced concern to potential distributors that it was a 'primer for anti-Semitism.' This view was not shared by all: Audiences embraced the film not only at Sundance but also in Moscow and Jerusalem--hotspots for 'touchy' Jewish subject matter. Additionally, the Anti-Defamation League's stated that 'the filmmaker succeeds in portraying this disturbing subject without legitimizing or glamorizing the hate-filled protagonist, anti-Semitism, or the lifestyle of skinheads.'
The New York Times published a feature last Sunday in which Cooper made a disclaimer that 'it's not for us to say what kind of films people should make.' But the Simon Wiesenthal Center holds a certain degree of influence as a Hollywood liaison for the Jewish community. Exactly how much influence is unclear, but ultimately no studio was willing to touch The Believer.
Bean insists that this should not be surprising. 'In truth, of course, many of the most powerful and interesting films don't get shown precisely because they are powerful and interesting,' he said. 'Our access to cinema is like our access to politics: We see a tiny portion of the whole spectrum.'
Fortunately, Hollywood's self-censorship is no longer
'This film failed to deliver,' wrote Rabbi Cooper in an e-mail that clarified the Wiesenthal's objection. He cited American History X as a film that gives insight into the dynamics of hate, something positive for younger viewers to receive. And yet that film seems too embarrassed by--yet also, strangely, exploitive of--its violence to expend any effort on examining gray area. Edward Norton's performance, powerful as it is, switches cleanly from monstrous evil to saved enlightenment. The message: Hate is bad.
The Believer makes History look like a TV movie.... Well, not one on Showtime. Presumably, Cooper's definition of 'motivation' defers to the conventional clichés of a parent's death, bullying or other childhood trauma. Instead, The Believer's script reveals its skinhead to be an intellectual who is as well-versed in--and vehemently antagonistic toward--Judaism as any other character ever put to film.
The only flashback of Danny's childhood shows him in Torah study, precociously latching on to a central site in Jewish theology with which rabbinical interpretations have always struggled. Young Danny cannot passively accept the teachings of the akedah, the story of God's covenant with Abraham in which the Lord orders his son Isaac to be sacrificed. Danny interprets this covenant, which lays the foundation for the Jews' relationship with God as one of divine oppression and blind submission; this legacy, in Danny's eyes, has poisoned all of Jewish history. He eventually turns against the religion, developing this rejection into powerfully articulated diatribes that consistently betray how he really feels: He may have rejected God's covenant, but he cannot reject God Himself.
A film this heady is, perhaps inevitably, unkempt and rough around many edges. Its production values are ultra-low budget but never crude, giving it an intimacy that can be achieved only when less is allowed to be more. In such a burdened script, it is almost necessary that the supporting characters be streamlined into symbolic functions: Curtis Zampf (Billy Zane) and Lina Moebius (Theresa Russell) are leaders of a neo-Fascist political movement that proves to be a convenient yet ultimately unsatisfactory channel for Danny's vicious charisma. The anti-Semitism of their fascism, like that of the skinheads' bigotry, is simply not on the same plane as Danny's--as his Nazi cohorts gradually realize, no one is as invested in Judaism as he, but he rises to prominence in their ranks even as he experiences a reawakening to the teachings of Torah. In the meantime, his bizarre romance with Lina's masochistic daughter (Summer Phoenix) transforms him into a kind of rabbi-manque as Danny teaches her Hebrew and Torah, under the mantra of 'know your enemy.'
By the end, his impossible duality of Jew and Nazi leave him perilously isolated from both sides. It is a duality that would be unimaginable were it not for the much-hyped performance of Ryan Gosling (Remember the Titans and, um, The New Mickey Mouse Club); no movie critic cliché can do justice to Gosling's feat, one that is as devastating as any moment in all of the careers of this year's Best Actor nominees.
Bean's impressive control over his material ensures that, though Danny may zealously overreach and distort some ideas, his twisted logic holds tight: Its challenge, no matter how unpleasant, is not based on ignorance, deceipt or even, in the end, coercion--it is never repudiated and ultimately remains unresolved. Such vicious self-criticism (or, self-hatred) is not at all alien to Judaism--many of his speeches about the Jews' 'female' passivity and crippling alienation from the land are echoes of Jewish critiques in early Zionist and Diaspora literature.
Almost any idea, pursued to its most extreme, will become volatile. 'Intellectual extremism fuels itself, creates ways to justify its own actions,' said Rabbi Bruce Selzer of the Freeman Center, citing the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin as a comparable instance of violent Jewish self-hatred. The killer was Yigal Amir, a Messianic Zionist driven by an unyielding vision of the 'proper' Jewish state. Selzer finds this to be a comparable instance of 'ideas that created the precedent for actions that are not okay. He thought he was doing something as a mitzvah, but he was taking some of the trees for the forest.'
It's an ironic distinction, because by nature all Jewish thinkers travel, in a sense, through that forest only by swinging from tree to tree. Talmudic tradition is lush with pedantic intricacy and endless branches of debate, a legal code that doubles in on itself and accounts for virtually any kind of permutation. In such a richly interpretive environment, fanaticism can easily thrive--perhaps this too is inevitable. But though such fatalist conclusions as Danny's are insupportable, they still grow from the same bush. 'It's extremist,' said Bean. 'But it's the extremist part of all of us--Danny just lives it out the way the rest of us think it, unconsciously or not.'
This is something that many people are not prepared to hear. In an e-mail, Rabbi Cooper seemed to deny incidences such as Rabin's assassination or Baruch Goldstein's suicidal assault against a Hebron mosque that left some 40 innocent worshippers dead and scores wounded: '[The idea of] Jewish gangs rampaging through churches and mosques,' he wrote, 'is alien to Judaism and the Jewish people in Israel and the world over.'
We are obviously in a moment when difficult subjects such as religion and mass violence are considered better not dealt with at all--just last week an exhibit of Holocaust art at the Jewish Museum in New York was denounced in heavy protesting as 'outrageous and unacceptable'. The Believer was originally slated for Showtime release on Sept. 30--in time for dinner table debate during High Holidays--but the unforeseen crisis left the nation in no condition to deal with such issues. Even Bean wrote in the British film journal Sight and Sound of his moment of doubt, when the film suddenly seemed to him like 'a can of gasoline left in the garage with old paint.' But if The Believer was conceived 20 years ago and born at Sundance, Sept. 11 is its circumcision, the brit milah that marks it as a real entry into the realm of religious discourse--a modern day midrash. In a world fraught with religious strife of all kinds, the element of fanaticism must be confronted and not further marginalized. A film such as The Believer can open up discussion, during Passover dinners and hopefully in classrooms and dorms--and not just about religion, but about all forms of group identities. Said Bean, 'You could make the black version of The Believer, or the gay version, the Polish version.... It's about how you can hate and love the things closest to you--and you need that hatred. Without that hatred, the love itself is diminished.'
The Believer will air on Showtime Monday, March 25, at 8pm.
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