The Believer (film)

This article is about the 2001 drama. For other films with similar titles, see Believer (disambiguation).
The Believer

Theatrical release poster
Directed by Henry Bean
Produced by Susan Hoffman
Christopher Roberts
Screenplay by Henry Bean
Story by Henry Bean
Mark Jacobson
Starring Ryan Gosling
Billy Zane
Theresa Russell
Summer Phoenix
Music by Joel Diamond
Cinematography Jim Denault
Edited by Mayin Lo
Lee Percy
Production
company
Distributed by Fireworks Pictures
Release dates
  • January 19, 2001 (2001-01-19) (Sundance)
  • May 17, 2002 (2002-05-17)
Running time
 98 minutes [1]
Country United States
Language English
Hebrew
Budget $1.5 million[2]
Box office $1,309,316[3][4]

The Believer is a 2001 American drama film co-written (with Mark Jacobson) and directed by Henry Bean. The film stars Ryan Gosling as Daniel Balint, a Jew who becomes a Neo-Nazi. It won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival and the Golden St. George at the 23rd Moscow International Film Festival.[5]

The film is loosely based on the true story of Dan Burros,[6] a member of the American Nazi Party and the New York branch of the United Klans of America. He committed suicide after being revealed as Jewish by a New York Times reporter.[7]

Plot

Daniel Balint is a former Jewish yeshiva student, brilliant but troubled, who is now a fanatically violent Neo-Nazi in New York in his early 20s. As a child, he often challenged his teachers with unorthodox interpretations of scripture. He once argued that the Binding of Isaac was not about Abraham's faith but God's power: that God did not want Abraham to accomplish a particular task but instead asks unquestioning obedience, which Abraham refuses to give. He concluded that God is a bully.

Daniel finds a meeting of fascists run by Curtis Zampf and Lina Moebius, where he also makes a connection with Lina's daughter Carla. Daniel advocates killing Jews, and a banker named Manzetti in particular, but Curtis and Lina oppose harming Jews on practical if not moral grounds. Impressed with Daniel's intelligence, Lina invites him to their camp retreat in the country. Afterward, Daniel and his fellow Neo-Nazi friends pick a fight with two African-American men, get arrested, and are bailed out of jail by Carla. He spends the night with her but returns to the home of his ailing father. Daniel searches his Hebrew school notebooks and finds a semiautomatic pistol. He is harangued by his sister Linda for his Nazi beliefs, but she also urges him to stay and have Shabbat dinner with their father. The men watch television, which is forbidden, leading them to commiserate on the incomprehensibility of Jewish law.

Guy Danielsen, a journalist writing an article on hate groups in the wake of the Oklahoma City Bombing, meets Daniel for an interview. He listens to Daniel's antisemitic rant, then reveals that he had been in contact with Daniel's old rabbi Stanley Nadelman and knows that Daniel is Jewish. Daniel pulls out his pistol and threatens to commit suicide if Guy publishes the truth.

Daniel goes to Lina's fascist camp retreat, where he meets Drake, a skilled marksman, along with an explosives expert. Six of the retreat participants, including Daniel, go to a Jewish deli, where they mock the other patrons and torment the owner about Jewish dietary laws until a fight breaks out. After this fight, Daniel and his friends are required by a court to take sensitivity training, where they listen to the experiences of Holocaust survivors. One talks about how his infant son was murdered by a Nazi. Daniel is enraged that the man did nothing to save his son, but all the survivors assert that Daniel would also have done nothing to avoid being killed, and he walks out in anger.

The story will haunt him, and he imagines himself as both the Nazi and the Jew. Later that night, Daniel and the other Neo-Nazis break into a synagogue, vandalize it, and plant a bomb under the pulpit. They also tear, trample, and spit on a Torah scroll, though Daniel protests. After they leave, Daniel takes the scroll and a tallit with him. The next morning, the Neo-Nazis hear on the news that the bomb failed to go off because the timer froze at thirteen minutes, which the rabbi explains is a mystical number in Judaism. He says that he believes this means that God protected the synagogue. Back in his cabin, Daniel cleans and repairs the scroll, envisioning himself as the Nazi soldier in the Holocaust survivor's story. He puts on the tallit under his shirt and performs a combination of the Nazi salute and a gesture used in Jewish prayers.

Drake soon approaches him with a plan to kill Manzetti, so the two ambush him outside a temple, where Daniel fires but misses. Drake sees the tallit under Daniel's shirt and realizes that he is a Jew, so Daniel shoots him and escapes. He continues to meet with Lina and Curtis, who want to start an above-ground movement to bring fascism into the political mainstream, inviting Jews, blacks, and liberals. Daniel reluctantly agrees to help them raise funds. At the meetings that follow Daniel first charms, then enrages, their potential donors with his intellectual games, leading to his eventual expulsion. When the group hears that Manzetti was killed, Lina suspects Daniel, since he proposed the assassination, but Drake is the real killer.

In the meantime, Carla comforts Daniel and the two sleep together at his home. When she sees the stolen Torah, she asks Daniel to teach her Hebrew, ostensibly for intellectual reasons. They also begin to practice Jewish rituals. He soon runs into an old friend and his fianceé, Stuart and Miriam, who invite him to a Rosh Hashanah service, assuming that he is an anti-racist skinhead. When Daniel arrives, another old friend calls him out as a racist skinhead. As he is leaving, Miriam, who works for the District Attorney, tells him that half of the people in Lina Moebius' meetings are informants for the D.A. Later she asks Daniel to record conversations at a meeting so she can help him with possible charges stemming from the Manzetti killing. He refuses because as Miriam confesses she doesn't care about the truth, she only cares about Daniel.

As Yom Kippur approaches, Daniel calls Miriam and insists on taking Stuart's place reading the Torah at the bema on Yom Kippur. He and his friends plant a new bomb under the temple's pulpit even though they find it reinforced, limiting the explosion. When Daniel takes the pulpit the next day, he is shocked to see Carla in the congregation. He again imagines himself in the story the Holocaust survivor told him, this time as both the Nazi and the Jew. With five minutes to go, Daniel stops and tells to everyone to get out because there is a bomb, but refuses to leave himself.

Daniel is shown in a mystical vision, ascending the stairs in the Jewish school he left as a child. His old teacher approaches, hoping to talk about the Binding of Isaac, and suggests that Isaac died on the mountain and was reborn in the next world. But Daniel ignores him and keeps going, up, and up, infinitely, as his teacher urges him to stop, calling out, "There's nothing up there."

Cast

Reception

The Believer received acclaim from critics, with high praise going toward Gosling's performance. It received an 82% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 90 reviews with an average rating of 7.3 out of 10; the consensus states "Gosling commands the screen with a raw, electrifying performance,"[8] Jamie Russell of BBC Films reports that it was "awe-inspiring ... a late contender for one of the best films of the year—an intellectually breathtaking, profoundly moving film."[9] The film also has a score of 75 on Metacritic based on 28 reviews.[10]

Charlotte O'Sullivan of The Independent says "It's naturally thrilling...The Believer is astonishing."[11] Time Out reports "the film is driven by Gosling's revelatory performance ... arresting, prickly, vaguely funny, even—'difficult' in the best sense."[12]

Todd McCarthy for Variety says "Bean deals with the core elements of this odd, and oddly compelling, situation with admirable frankness and intelligence, but flounders around the edges. The tenets of Zampf and Moebius' political movement receive such scant attention that the scenes devoted to it are borderline ludicrous, and the masochistic impulses that seem to draw Carla to Danny—"Hurt me!," she begs at the start of their first sexual encounter, and he willingly obliges—are rote and undeveloped."[13]

Julie Salamon for The New York Times says "This willfully provocative film portrait (...) offers lots of raging, vulgarity and shock but little insight into the character's psychopathology. (...) The movie's most telling moment comes when Danny confronts Holocaust survivors about why they allowed themselves to be brutalized. One of them, an old man, responds by asking, And what shall we learn from you, Daniel ? It's a good question, never answered.[14]

David Germain for The Washington Post says, "Even as he commits hate crimes and becomes an anti-Jewish rabble-rouser, the youth is torn between contempt for Jewish passivity during the Holocaust and reverence for the traditions of Judaism."[15]

Peter Travers for Rolling Stone says, "This is a touchy topic, notably for Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who felt the film didn't work and has publicly said so. Without full-throttle support from the Jewish community, The Believer is on the ropes. Bean, a Conservative Jew from Philadelphia, is a screenwriter with a commercial track record, from Internal Affairs to Enemy of the State. (...) In Gosling, a Canadian actor who started at twelve as a TV Mouseketeer alongside Britney Spears before moving on to film (Remember the Titans), Bean has found the perfect actor. Gosling gives a great, dare-anything performance that will be talked of for ages.[16]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "The Believer (15)". British Board of Film Classification. 2001-09-14. Retrieved 2011-12-10.
  2. ↑ The Believer at Box Office Mojo
  3. ↑ http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=believer02.htm
  4. ↑ http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=intl&id=believer02.htm
  5. ↑ "23rd Moscow International Film Festival (2001)". MIFF. Retrieved 2013-03-29.
  6. ↑ Henry Bean, The Believer: Confronting Jewish Self-Hatred. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2002. ISBN 1-56025-372-X.
  7. ↑ Reelingreviews.com
  8. ↑ The Believer at Rotten Tomatoes
  9. ↑ The Believer (movie review) BBC, 4 December 2001
  10. ↑ http://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-believer
  11. ↑ The Big Picture: The Believers (review) The Independent, 7 December 2001
  12. ↑ The Believer (review) Time Out New York
  13. ↑ Review: The Believer Variety
  14. ↑ The Believer, Imagery of Anger In a Troubled Mind, The New York Times
  15. ↑ 'The Believer' Wins at Sundance, The Washington Post
  16. ↑
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Awards
Preceded by
Girlfight tied with
You Can Count on Me		 Sundance Grand Jury Prize: U.S. Dramatic
2001 		Succeeded by
Personal Velocity
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