The Believer [2001]

Amazon.co.uk Review

With The Believer, his first film as director, screenwriter Henry Bean wastes no time in going for the jugular. In the opening scene a timid Yeshiva student is chased off a New York subway train, racially abused and savagely beaten up by a ranting skinhead, and from then on in the level of hatred and violence rarely abates. But the passion that fuels the film is as much psychological as physical. The skinhead Danny Balint is the film's protagonist, and his anti-Semitic venom has an unusual cause: he's Jewish himself.

Bean, whose previous work as a scriptwriter (Mulholland Falls and the like) has been accomplished but not exceptional, tackles this fraught subject with a strong sense of personal commitment. He doesn't go for easy targets, either. Like Edward Norton's character in American History X, Danny is no mindless thug: he's intelligent and frighteningly articulate, and he can argue his case with mouth and brains no less than with fists and boots. The film traces his attitude back to his schooldays, when he revolted against the unquestioning submission to Orthodox doctrine that his teachers tried to instil. Faced with a group of Holocaust survivors he denounces them for their passivity in the face of oppression. "Kill your enemies!" he tells them scornfully.

There's a lot of talk in this film, and several of the characters are little more than mouthpieces for their respective views. (If Bernard Shaw had ever written a play about anti-Semitism, it might have come out rather like this.) But the play of ideas is passionate and deeply felt, and as the tormented Danny, constantly drawn back to the faith he despises, Ryan Gosling gives a riveting performance. This is an intense, anguished film that dares to pose deeply disquieting questions. --Philip Kemp

On the DVD: Although the disc only has one special feature, "Anatomy of a Scene", courtesy of the Sundance Channel, it is an interesting and informative dissection of the filming processes, the casting and the controversial and moving script. The visuals are on top form with 16:9 widescreen, but the sound is a disappointment--only mustering a 2.0 Dolby Digital Stereo. --Nikki Disney

Customer Reviews:

Compelling story and truly interesting take on Judaism.......2007-11-14

I had seen the Believer at the cinema, and have recently seen it again in DVD. This movie had left a strong impression on me, and the feeling has been confirmed after watching it again.
It is the story (inspired by the true story of a certain Daniel Burros) of a young Neo-Nazi Jew taken in the net of contradictions between his religion/roots and his antisemitic ideology, between the quest for meaning and self-hatred. One might have feared clichés and simplistic psychology, but none of these in that movie. The actor (whose performance some newspapers rightly compared to De Niro's in Taxi Driver) perfectly incarnates this young man undergoing a metaphysicial crisis -- a rebel rejecting his roots and religion, but prisioner, despite himself, of his own identity, which will constantly catch him up.
Metaphysical questioning and very interesting reflexions on judaism makes this movie powerful, thought-provoking and excellent (careful though : several violent scenes).
The non-manicheistic, quite existentialist end brings more questions than answers and illustrates the inner questioning and complex / yet coherent psychology of Daniel, the protagonist.

In short, an intense and powerful movie, that I strongly recommend. Let me quote the words of Mr Maurice Samuel (a Jewish author) which echo Daniel's own questioning and self-destructive behaviour :

". . . we Jews,
the destroyers, will remain the destroyer forever. . . nothing that the
Gentiles will do will meet our needs and demands".

When it was released, the Believer didn't find a film distributor in USA, and remained confidential there -- given the anti-Hollywood treatment of the subject, this is no surprise. Yet the film was released in various European countries and Israel as well. It won the Grand Jury Prize in Sundance Festival in 2001.

Believe.......2007-10-17

Ryan Gosling is terrific in this. His performance is absolutely spellbinding. We see him as Daniel, rising through the ranks of a a fictional American Neo-Fascist party.We see the pain of his contradictions and his inner-suffering as he attempts to reconcile his orthodox religious past with the anti-Jewish side of his identity.There is much religious symbolism and it all builds towards an amazing existential conclusion. A `must-see'.

A cut above the rest.......2006-06-04

Although graphic to watch in places this film is highly deserving of any praise it receives. It deals with a controversial subject remarkably well and with real power. It also comes at it from a new angle, that of the Jewish Nazi, which gives it that extra edginess. I have rarely seen a film that left me thinking of it's issues so long and recommending it to so many people.

Ryan Gosling deserves an Oscar.......2006-03-29

This film is raw, gritty and powerful, but more than that it is so rough around the edges that you can't tell at times whether it's a documentary or a film. This film is Oscar material, Ryan Goslings performance is so intense and conflicted that he sincerely deserved an Oscar for his excellent effort in this film.

All the actors do a good job in this film (though it may have been interesting to see more conversing between Billy Zane and Ryan Goslings character). Theresa Russel reminded me of my Right-wing teachers at Primary school - very intimidating.

The Director really did a superb job here and created alot of empathy (and sympathy) for Ryan Gosling's character. Like Tim Roth's character in Made in Britain he is an intellectual, who feels shackled by society and Liberalism and the only way he can stand against is by being part of the Right-wing and opposing the State.

I felt this film shed alot of light on Judaism and actually gave me a better understanding of it (and it wasn't done in a preachy manner).

An excellent film, worthy of five stars and well worth a watch for those who like their films more raw than the usual Hollywood fare.

Unbelievably unescapable.......2006-02-13

To be or not to be a Jew. The film seems to tell us how a Jew tried to become a nazi in today’s America. In fact it opens up a completely different ideological and historical cornucopia. What happened to the Jewsih people when they decided to codify their faith, their life and their vision of the world in a set of books that were declared to be God’s own discourse ? It became absolutely unchangeable, untransformable, and the Jews all know that history is an ever moving and ever changing reality that can neither be denied because it is the real world, nor accepted because it implies the sacred books are not eternally true. This creates a tremendous need for the Jews to privatize their faith in God, their religion and their rites as a purely personal business, and to invest their public life in the world in order to do things, to be involved, to be carried six days a week by the changing wave of historical movement. Their life, their consciousness, their vision of the world are thus split in two and this division of life in two makes it impossible for them either to push their belief to the absolute end of it which means the rejection of the real world, nor to invest themselves into the real world totally which would mean the rejection of the forever unchanging corpus of their religious beliefs. And it is this very dilemma that is the very energy necessary for them to excel in any field they will try to penetrate : they will excel in order to sublimate and compensate the deeply torn consciousness of theirs, and at the same time they will invent intellectual systems that will systematically divide reality in two opposed elements that can never merge nor disappear, history and the real world being always a remapping of the same two antagons. Marx will postulate the class struggle reduced to two antagonistic classes, the working class and the bourgeoisie. Freud will postulate the psyche of the individual as being the antagonistic struggle between two principles, Eros and Thanatos. Even Einstein will postulate reality to be the combination of two antagonistic principles that are associated in an eternal confrontation under the uncatchable concept of energy. Everything is energy but energy is a dual carriage way that leads nowhere and is nothing but two ever moving lanes of traffic that are both evading and chasing each other. The question that remains in our minds when the screen turns black is : if we can’t evade this reality, if this vision is true, what can human beings, Jewish or not, do ? Escape it in total self-destruction (that can be hijacked into destroying other people for a while like Hitler or Himmler did), or submit to this reality, call this submission faith and God, and follow the trend and the current the way it goes. This vision is utterly pessimistic since there is no possible conscious effective action for human beings to influence the future that will be the blind result of the inner dialectics of material reality. It can even lead some to believe there cannot be any freedom, any peace, any progress, and that this material world is nothing but a materialistic illusion, that our supposed consciousness is nothing but a dream and circular self-hypnosis. Daniel Balint is thus a reincarnation of Daniel, the prophet, whose knowledge is such that he knows there is no future outside the lions’ den.