Believer, The (2002)

The Believer: A Muddle, by Griz Bear Man

On one level the film is gripping, interesting, and well acted and brilliantly acted in the case of Ryan Gosling who gives one of the best performances I have seen in my life. And it is provocative, makes you think, which is precisely where the film gets in trouble, when you start thinking about it, and realize it is full of holes and you then are trying to fill in the holes only to have more to appear all the time.

I can only barely deal with one of the holes here–the main character Danny. Ryan Gosling is so brilliant that he actually makes this character, this impossible, absurd tangle of contradictions, believable, even sympathetic. At best the character needs intense therapy, if there is even any therapist who would want to take him on. I can understand his being angry at his people for not fighting back during the Holocaust, and even turning against them, saying “to hell with them.” But killing Jews? Would he kill, then, his own father for whom he seems to have tender feelings? He retains his reverence for the Torah and, at the court-appointed sensitivity training session, he feels deeply pained as well as angry at hearing Holocaust survivor’s story of the SS man killing his son. Yet he extorts people to hate Jews, advocates killing them, helps the neo Nazi group he is a part of plant bombs in synagogues even though he sees to it these attempts are foiled. For what reason? Why bother? Who is he fighting, really? His own people, himself, or even the neo-Nazis at least at the end? Or the ridiculous premise of this movie that is very much like this year’s edition of the Kansas Jayhawks men’s basketball team–overrated. His motivations for a lot of things are rarely clear–and he suffers from as much moral confusion as his girl friend suffers from sexual confusion (I really hope she was not having sex with who I thought she was in the scene where Danny climbs up to her window)–what is her motivation for learning the Torah, and for what reason does she suddenly show up in the synagogue (how did she even know where it is?) on the eve of Danny’s “redemption”? Actually very few motivations of any of the characters are clear. The film has more loose threads and incomplete story lines than an undergraduate fiction writing class at Sarah Lawrence College, so many that, as I said, I cannot even begin to deal with them. So it better be a film of ideas, because as a story it is a hopeless muddle. Maybe the screen writer, a Conservative Jew, used the film, and the character Danny, as a vehicle to say things he could not otherwise say publicly. But why even say them? Some of Danny’s statements are persuasive and might give the wrong people the wrong ideas, even if they may get other people to really examine and appreciate Jewish culture and religion.

Actually, the real unstated point of the film, if it can be said to have one, is that fascism is no longer about hating Jews, it is about loving power and money, and that whites, Jews, blacks, et al. are all getting a piece of the action, in which case America may be well on the way to becoming a fascist state–think about it, the architect of neo-fascist unipolarism is a Jewish intellectual who is angry Jews did not fight back during the Holocaust and that one of the defenders of unipolarism is a black woman who has publicly admitted she is fascinated by power. How about that for a provocative, and, for once, clear idea?