Independent Magazine Article

on Believer

WARNING!! THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS OF THE END OF THE MOVIE!! ALSO SOME MATERIAL MIGHT BE OFFENSIVE TO SOME AND MAY BE INAPPROPRIATE FOR YOUNG READERS!!

Thanks for use of pics and article goes to Stacey.

The Contrary Son

Why is The Believer a more “difficult” movie than many others?

by Beth Pinsker

WHEN HENRY BEAN, A SCREENWRITER WITH CREDITS LIKE Internal Affairs and Deep Cover, set out to direct his first feature, he wanted it to be about love as much as it was about hate. He wanted to show that sometimes the more we love something ---- one’s parents or country or religion ---- the more it’s possible to also hate of feel stifled by that thing, and this is what tears us up inside about all the important elements in out lives.

What he came up with is The Believer, a daring debut film about a yeshiva student who turns into a neo-Nazi. The young man, Danny Balint (played by newcomer Ryan Gosling), loves Jews so much that he doesn’t understand why they don’t assert themselves as a people and fight back against all of those who seek to harm them. He thinks that God is also conspiring to keep Jews meek by holding them under the thumb of the Torah, with all its laws and daily requirements.

For Danny, it all comes down to when God commanded Abraham to slay his son Isaac. “It’s all about God’s power. God says, you know how powerful I am? I can make you do anything I want --- even kill your own son, because I’m everything and you’re nothing,” says the young Danny to his Talmud instructor in a flashback. He gets kicked out of class when he continues, “I think the whole Jewish people were permanently scarred by what happened on Mount Moriah. And we still live in terror. Fear of God makes you afraid of everything. All the Jews are good at is being afraid --- being sacrificed.”

And so this love takes on the guise of hate. The adult Danny becomes a skinhead, wears a swastika T-shirt, and revels in the fear he ignites on the streets of New York. He imagines himself as Nazi in Germany, rounding up Jews. He advocates in grand, articulate speeches that the Jews should be destroyed and sets out to kill a prominent Jewish businessman.

Bean welcomes controversy, but the way his film has been received is something different. The Believer won the grand jury prize at Sundance and then catapulted the director into a Hollywood maelstrom that has left Bean without a major theatrical distributor. The process started normally enough. After Sundance, Bean went to Los Angeles to sell the film and he showed it to the staff at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, curators of Los Angeles’ Museum of Tolerance. This kind of screening has become more than a courtesy in the entertainment world. Filmmakers with work about gays show it to the GLAAD, those with work about blacks run it past the NAACP, and those with work about Jews show it to the Wiesenthal Center of the Anti-Defamation League.

There are no guarantees that the result will always be positive, though. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the assistant dean of the Wiesenthal Center, didn’t like The Believer. “This film did not work,” he told the Los Angeles Times after the issue became public. Potential distributors fled, for unstated reasons. Bean was flabbergasted. “I blithely went over there to show this film, thinking they would see it for what it was, and obvious paean to Judaism,” he says. But like a film that can’t ever get its legs because its first weekend is slow, Bean says, “It was too late. It was like the first weekend was bad in the Jewish world.”

Bean did slightly better with the Anti-Defamation League, but still the tone was muted. “While many may find it objectionable,” the ADL says in an official statement on the film, “the filmmaker succeeds in his portrayal of this disturbing subject without legitimizing or glamorizing the hate-filled protagonist, anti-Semitism, or the lifestyle of skinheads.”

Critics tried to plead the filmmaker’s cause. In Entertainment Weekly, Lisa Schwartzbaum took the space she would have used to review Town and Country (which didn’t end up having a press screening) to trumpet the film as “unique feature film aflame with vivid depictions of the wages of brutish hate.”

“Far worse films have been backed. Why make such a big deal about this?” she asks.

The film won’t exactly die on the festival circuit, like so many other films labeled “difficult” or “not commercial,” but it won’t go as far as most celebrated Sundance films either. Bean sold his film to Showtime, where it will premiere in September --- around the time of the Jewish High Holidays --- as part of the pay cable network’s “No Limits” campaign. A couple of months later, IDP, the distribution arm of the film’s production company, might stage a small theatrical release. The Believer will be eligible for the Emmys, but not the Oscars, Independent Spirits, or other film awards.

“Even though the picture is one of the highest profile available as an acquisition, a lot of people found it easier to say no,” says Bob Aaronson, IDP’s vice president of acquisitions. “With the USA’s and Searchlight’s of today, they don’t’ have the appetite for anything challenging. But they’re all challenging.”

WHAT EXACTLY IS IT ABOUT TIS FILM THAT IT WAS TOO much for a company like Miramax, which released Antonia Bird’s Priest on Easter, or Sony Pictures Classics, which released the similarly controversial In the Company of Men?

The issue is not about a Jew turning into a neo-nazi, despite how controversial that simple description sounds. People now generally understand the psychological concept of identifying with the aggressor. And Bean’s premise is based on the true story of Daniel Burros, a KK grand dragon who committed suicide in 1965 after The New York Times reported that he was Jewish.

It’s not about Bean himself. The first question people ask is if he’s Jewish --- just to make sure. (For better or worse, it would be a whole different kind of controversy if a non-Jew made a film like this.) And he is, in fact. He’s a Reform Jew from Philadelphia who now lives in New York.

It isn’t even about the anti-Semitism that the main character spouts, or his desecrating a Torah (no actual Torah was harmed in the filming). The Wiesenthal Center got behind American History X, in which Edward Norton portrayed a charismatic neo-Nazi, though it depicted similar savagery. It even showed the film at its museum to teach young kids about hate.

What Rabbi Cooper and others respond to is something intangible in the film’s tone, which people read differently depending on their backgrounds. For some all it signals is that others are going to find it controversial, while they don’t themselves --- “all I got at first were constant predictions of controversy to come, without encountering any of the controversy,” Bean says. For those others it creates an immediate visceral reaction that can often be negative.

“I think some viewers will be fearful that, in the wrong hands, The Believer might justify or provoke violence,” says Annette Insdorf, director of the undergraduate studies at Colombia University and author of Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust. Insdorf was impressed by the acting, and thought the film “compelling, thought-provoking and tautly directed.” She also found the film disturbing in that there is so much detail left out. “What happened in the intervening decade or so between the flashback in the classroom and his avowed desire to kill Jews?” she asks. “How was he affected by his (absent) mother or his all-too-briefly presented father? Because it raises more questions than it answers, there is an unsatisfying feeling at the end.”

In the film world, the situation is much like what happened with In the Company of Men at Sundance four years prior.

“We get into cultural debates every year at Sundance,” says the festival’s director, Geoff Gilmore, citing Errol Morris’ Mr. Death and Sex: The Annabel Chong Story. “What’s different about The Believer and In the Company of Men is that they are literally about an exploration of the phenomenon [of racism or sexism]. With The Believer, it’s about that crisis of cultural identity, which is a universal subject, and of this very particular self-loathing of Jews that has been a tradition of Jewish art and literature.”

This self-hating or even just bare exploration of religion happens to be one of the most touchy subjects in American Judaism today. Bean’s film takes it to an extreme, but if Danny Balint had merely gone from being a yeshiva student to eating bacon cheeseburgers --- while expressing the same ambivalent emotions about his upbringing and God --- the filmmaker might have enraged the same groups of people.

The character gets deep into this debate throughout the movie. At one point, he’s arguing with an old classmate at synagogue. Avi, who doesn’t know Danny really is a skinhead, calls him a Jewish Nazi because he thinks Jews are wimps. Danny fires back that Zionists are Nazis.

“They’re racist, militaristic, and act like storm troopers in the territories,” Danny says.

An older woman standing with them sizes up the situation in a snap and asks Danny pointedly, “Do you hate them because they’re wimps or because they’re storm troopers? Or do you just hate them?”

In just one exchange, Bean has riled up about seven different ongoing theological and moral debates within the Jewish community --- self-hatred, the treatment of the Palestinians in Israel, the goals of Zionism, assimilation, ultra-Orthodoxy, Holocaust, obsession, and talking in synagogue.

THEN, TOO, THERE’S THE ENDING TO DEAL WITH, WHICH IS always crucial in a film that is supposed to make a cultural point. Jewish groups endorsed American History X, essentially, because by the conclusion of the film the neo-Nazi sees the error of his ways. One of Rabbi Cooper’s chief criticisms of The Believer is about where it leads. He doesn’t see a pedagogic line that eventually dispels the character’s anti-Semitic rants. Instead, it appears that the character is sanctified in spite of his beliefs; he’s destroyed in the end, but it seems that it’s as a martyr and not in retribution.

“The only way I can rationalize the story is to look closely at the opening and the closing, which invoke Abraham’s binding of Isaac,” says Insdorff. “The frame of The Believer is about God testing man, while Danny seems to be testing God: How far can Danny go before being stopped? A sacrifice is the answer.”

“I didn’t think it was finally about self-hatred,” Bean argues. “The character had ambivalence, I felt. He loves Judaism just as much as he hates it.” And whether or not he is destroyed in the end, has a hand in his own destruction, returns to Judaism, or defies until the end, is up in the air. Bean knows what he thinks, but realizes that people will read the film as they want.

“There is this dynamic, it’s there throughout the film and some people will get it in vast detail. Some will have a feeling that they can’t articulate,” he says.

All of this, however, may be too fine a Talmudic point for most viewers. In fact, much of the philosophical debate about the film may be too detailed for those who aren’t schooled in the Yom Kippur prayers or the commentaries on the binding of Isaac.

MATTHEW DUDA, SHOWTIME’S EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT of program acquisitions and planning, is not a Torah scholar. What he does know is dealing with controversial films. His network’s responsible for the gay series Queer as Folk as well as the acquisition of Angelica Huston’s Bastard Out of Carolina, which Ted Turner wouldn’t let New Line release because the child abuse it depicted was too graphic, and Adrian Lyne’s Lolita, which no American distributor would touch because of the sexual content.

“Premium cable has become the place to handle difficult material,” Duda says. In fact, premium cable needs to difficult material in order to separate itself from the pack and get people to pay a monthly fee for access. Duda needs not only to scoop HBO on provocative material, but also network TV, basic cable, and the weekend movies. What could better for that than premiering a film that nobody else will touch?

The way Duda builds up a film like The Believer is through a steady marketing campaign, with review tapes for influential critics and on-air promotions and advisories. Duda makes use of the channel’s Web site [www.sho.com] to supply additional material and chat opportunities. He also has the option of putting together a special discussion after the film, either for air or in private, so that people can discuss the issues that he film raises. If all goes well, the film will score decent ratings on its opening night, live on in replays and on video, and help cement Showtime’s reputation for daring.

“No Limits’ doesn’t mean there’s not programming we wouldn’t put on the air,” Duda says. “We want high quality entertainment that’s dramatic as well as funny. There’ always somebody out there saying you shouldn’t do lots of things. That’s what our free society gives us. Lively debate, we welcome it.”

Duda also had the option of trying to get community support before a show airs by scheduling special screenings for groups like the Wiesenthal Center --- except, not now in this particular case.

This process of drumming up support from an interested community isn’t exactly new, but it has never before been so entrenched and so public. Scott Seomin, entertainment media director of GLAAD, traces it back to when his group had success boycotting Basic Instinct in 1992, and says it has been growing ever since.

Rabbi Cooper says he’s been asked for years for help on various projects, but only as a way to try to avoid offensive images or historical inaccuracies and not as an effort in censorship or political correctness.

“Nobody has to come to us to pass muster,” he says. “It’s usually very minor input, like making sure the number of people who dies in a concentration camp is correct. In 24 years, and including The Believer, I’ve never picked up a phone to say to somebody in the industry not to make a film.”

In this case, however, Showtime might have more luck using the director to go out there and explain his film. Bean can, in a sense, sooth any nerves that might get jangled market by market. This is what Neil LaBute did when some critics accused In the Company of Men of misogyny and tagged the director with the same motives as his characters. LaBute explained what he was trying to do in the film --- talking about the psychological exploration of evil --- and more and more critics started to get it and like the film as a result. The little details about LaBute being a nice guy, and a practicing Mormon, didn’t hurt either.

Bean doesn’t want his background and his motives to get too confuse with the meaning of the film. Yet he doesn’t stonewall either about his Jewish upbringing and his own feeling about religion. But, he says, “Whatever I am, the film remains what it is.”

He thinks that too many personal details about a director can be distracting. “It clouds your own personal reaction to it. If I’m proud of one thing in this film, it’s that we threw a million things in there and didn’t sort it our for you.” With In the Company of Men, he says that if people were comforted knowing that LaBute was a Mormon, in the sense that it made him seem wholesome, that they would see the film through a different moral prism. And that’s too easy. “The scary and exciting thing about that film is being able to read your own thing into it,” he says.

For the same reasons, Bean as well as others like Sundance’s Gilmore, worry about the effect community groups will have on free speech if they scare potential distributors into thinking that films do have to pass some sort of political correctness test --- no matter if the group’s true intent is just to inform. If the idea of sending studio product past community groups is relatively new, imagine their shock at having to send something like The Believer. Directors still getting used to the attention and freedom of the indie film boom are suddenly up against a new challenge of conformity.

“Characters that come out of some of these films give a sense of something that’s breaking molds and that deals with different kinds of aspects of identity. People could look at this and say, ‘You can’t portray this in this way,’” Gilmore says.

Bean thinks the more edgy independent films might be in danger of getting cut off under this new system of checks. “Distributors,” he says, “are scared of the prospect of negative publicity. At one of the places, a publicist said to me, ‘I can market the hell out of this film.’ The truth is, the studio decided it’s nothing compared to damage they might incur if organized Jewish groups decided to take it out.”

The result of this pressure, Bean says, is that, “The studio movie business --- even on the art-house level --- is always being pushed toward lowest common denominator. We get the blandest version of everything, and that becomes more and more our culture.”

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