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Impossible contradiction?

"The Believer," tells the story of Danny Balint (GOSLING), a young Jewish man who, incredibly, is also the leader of a neo-Nazi group of skinheads. Danny struts around the streets of New York City wearing a swastika T-shirt, accompanied by his 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. All this while secretly being Jewish himself.

His anti-Semitic feelings are further sparked when he encounters fascist leaders Lina Moebius (RUSSELL) and Curtis Zampf (ZANE). However, unlike Zampf and Moebius who prefer a more passive approach, Danny professes a desire to see a violent end to all Jews. 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.

This might seem like a recipe for disaster, but I found it the most believeable of recent attempts to discuss Nazism and Fascism on screen. Danny might be out of his mind, but he is not mindless. He seems to have set out to deliberately test his Judaism in the most extreme way possible. Danny starts getting annoyed at how his thug companions start ripping up sacred scrolls and playing with offerings for the dead, not understanding the culture and religion they hate so vehemently. In that memorable scene, one of his companions even says the incredible line "Who's Eichmann?"

Amazingly, "The Believer" is based on a true story; a Jewish kid involved with a neo-Nazi group a few years ago, ended up killing himself when the New York Times revealed his true identity. This only adds to the poignancy and impact of the film.

Unlike Edward Norton's critically-lauded performance in "American History X", Gosling's transformation is slower, more painful and, most importantly, beleivable. However, Gosling will be unable to win an Oscar for this oscar-worthy role, as "The Believer" could not get a US distributer. Another attempt to direct the flow of emotion in the States away from their own loose cannons. It won the grand jury prize in Sundance, but is going straight to cable TV in the US. In an interview for The Guardian, Bean holds Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for holocaust studies, at least partly responsible for its failure to secure a US distribution deal.

"I think the film is almost embarrassingly philo-Semitic," argues Bean, "although there is a tremendous amount of anti-Semitic in vective at its surface, the character is an intelligent guy but he's not deeply sophisticated. I tried to give him the best anti-Semitic arguments that I thought a character like that could possibly have."

"We expected there to be some anxiety, and we were afraid of how people would take it, so we thought we'd go to a major Jewish organisation and show them the film, and that they'd see what it was really about."

Rabbi Cooper disagrees, with an unhelpful and lack-lustre response: "We don't learn the motivation of the protagonist."

Danny's arguments are often racist and obnoxious, but it's absurd to suggest the film endorses them. Like that other great, controversial film , Kevin Smith's "Dogma", this is a god-friendly work. The emphasis is on belief, rather than stupid rules. Danny hates the circular logic and finicky dogma of the Torah, and how it seems to be irrelevant to God. In Danny's own words: "I'm the only one who does believe! That's the problem!" Some have argued that in the end Danny is redeemed, but I would argue that the film's climactic and apocalyptic ending is not a redemption, but a fusing of this "impossible contradiction." He is a Jew and a neo-Nazi at once, never quite reconciling them.

'The Believer' - Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival and the Gold St. George at this year's Moscow International Film Festival.

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