The Believer

By Ian Waldron-Mantgani

Ian Waldron-Mantgani is the film critc for UKCritic.com

Danny struts around the streets of New York City wearing a swastika T-shirt, accompanied by skinhead buddies. He attends fascist meetings to remind the participants to put an emphasis on anti-Semitism. He starts a fight with a waiter in one kosher diner, and pulls a gun in another. And he is Jewish.

The kid is frustrated by his upbringing -- so frustrated that he spews hatred and feels violent urges running through him like electricity. He hates the circular logic and finicky dogma of the Torah, and how it seems to be irrelevant to God. He hates the weakness of his people, how ineffectual they were in the face of the Nazis, how they seem to have adopted persecution as a badge of identity for no other reason than to feel sorry for themselves.

He expresses admiration for the Third Reich, but he doesn't seem like the type of guy who would have been at home in Nazi Germany. One scene in The Believer shows us an attack on a synagogue, where Danny starts getting annoyed at how his thug companions start ripping up sacred scrolls and playing with offerings for the dead. Danny might be out of his mind, but he is not mindless. He despises the Jewish religion because he agrees his are the chosen people and the God of the Old Testament is real -- and he's appalled at both the people and the God. A flashback shows him arguing with his primary school theology teacher; a classmate accuses Danny of being a non-believer, and he responds, "I'm the only one who does believe! That's the problem!"

The Believer is based on a true story; there really was a Jewish kid involved with a neo-Nazi group a few years ago, who ended up killing himself when the New York Times revealed his true identity. In the movie, the character has echoes of Edward Norton's role in American History X, with his gift for rhetoric and frighteningly well-thought arguments, which are based on vindictive logic, not hot air.

There is a moment in a diner that rings especially true, when Danny veers between intelligent objections to the Jews and a bizarre tangent about the perverseness of fellatio. What we see here is the fundamental irrationality of someone who would translate ideology into violence.

And Danny sure is violent. The Believer does not merely tell us the story of a boy with far too much anger, but follows him as he sniffs around the training camps of fellow right-wing nuts, daydreams about assassinating Jewish leaders, and carries out several bombings on local Jewish shrines.

Danny is played by Ryan Gosling in a performance of incendiary intensity, and the power of the acting comes not through his ranting and ranting voice, but through his eyes, which really make us believe that all this conflict is going on his head. The love, the hate, the violence, the pure frustration.

The Believer is not a great movie. The structure does not do full justice to the material, and almost every time Danny gets violent, director Henry Bean goes over-the-top, introducing sudden blasts of double-drumbeat synthesiser music that sounds like Adam and the Ants crossed with the score from Mississippi Burning. Still, The Believer has some fascinating and terrifying aspects that simply demand attention -- the screenplay offers a complex premise and delivers on it in thought-provoking ways; the gritty, cheap photography encourages a certain gut reaction; and Gosling's performance is one of the best of the year. There is fire here.