A powerful film with a strong performances (The Believer (DVD))

Name: mmintfresh

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Product:	The Believer (DVD)
Date:	06/07/02 (20 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good film

Disadvantages: The story is not tight and focused enough

Danny Balint (Ryan Gosling) is an intelligent and articulate young man. He was brought up as a jew but often questioned his faith and got into arguments with the rabbi about it because he saw God as a bully etc. As he grows he becomes resentful of his religion, largely because he sees the jews as a weak race because they did nothing about the holocaust and would rather think than fight. He feels that this is really setting the jews up to be punished and hated. During the beginning of the film he tries to get a young jewsih man to hit him and his refusal makes him even more angry.
Danny becomes involved with a neo-nazi group, he shaves his head and proudly wears his swastika tshirt infront of jews and blacks.

One day Danny and his three friends go to a facist meeting run by Lina Moebius (Theresa Russell) and Curtis Zampf (Billy Zane). They see that Danny would be the perfect candidate to lead anti-sematic talks. His speech about killing jews at the meeting also catches the attention of a reporter, who finds out that Danny is a jew. Danny threatens that if that gets out he will kill himself. Meanwhile Danny is still in the neo-nazis group but by night he studies the torah and also teaches it to the daughter of Lina, Carla(Summer Phoenix). He manages ok at first but when the gang try to destroy some torah's in a synagogue he gets upset and takes it home to fix, another time he is forced to listen to some holocaust victims because of a fight he causes in a koser cafe. He gets upset by a man who watched helplessly as his son was killed and asked why didn't you do anything? His conflicting ideas and views get harder and harder to deal with.

The Believer is a low budget independant flick from writer/director Henry Bean. It got a limited release in the UK mainly the arthouse cinema's and a very small one in america earlier this year. It won a string of prizes at Sundance including best actor/director/writer and best film in the dramtic co
mpettion. It is a very compelling film and also provocative and is sometimes seen as being anti sematic.

I think this is mainly down to the outstanding performance by Ryan Gosling. He is surprisingly believable as Danny who has an inner turmoil from having to hide his beliefs from both the jewish and nazi community. His also like a young hitler in his speeches and advocations of killing jews to create germany all over again. The audience also get to see a lot of him and although his reasons for his facism isn't really explained we get to learn quite a lot about him and also towards the end feel sympathy for him.

The other performances are also good although we get to learn very little about anyone else except for Carla, who is slightly masochistic but also intelligent. All the skin heads look freaky particulary Drake (Glenn Fitzgerald from Series 7) with a swastika tattoo on his lip, also the fact that they know almost nothign about judaism except they hate it also gives them a sadistic way.

The direction and music are excellent, we get a lot of hand held camera work that gives it an almost documentary look and the music emphasises scenes and gives them a more sinister edge. The only let down is the story, we only really get to know Danny but his reasons aren't really explained. The film would be a lot more satisfying if we learnt a bit about Danny's motivation and past instead of seeing a couple of few minute flashbacks.

This film is often compared to the also brilliant American History X but it is much stronger than that because there isn't really any resolution for Gosling's character as there is for Norton's. I would defintely recommend this film but it probably won't be suited to partcualary sensitive people who may take offence from Danny's speechs and ramblings.

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