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Also this issue: And So To Bed |
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May 23-29, 2002
interview
"Thrilling” probably isn’t the first word you expect Henry Bean to use when talking about his writing The Believer. The film’s protagonist, Danny Balint (Ryan Gosling) is a yeshiva student so consumed with self-hatred that he becomes a neo-Nazi, using his powerful intellect to construct elaborate arguments in favor of the extermination of the Jews. Bean, who grew up in Philadelphia and whose parents still live in Society Hill, is no thrill jockey, nor a simple-minded provocateur. What thrilled him about writing the movie, which won the grand jury prize at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, was not the opportunity to push buttons (although you sense he enjoys that as well), but the opportunity to explore and deepen his understanding of his own history.
"A friend said to me, ŒThis isn't a movie about a neo-Nazi; it's a movie about being Jewish,' and I think that's true," Bean explains during a brief visit early this week. "Danny hates Judaism, but he loves it as well -- he wants to live the contradiction. That's why he tells his teacher, ŒI'm the only one who really believes in God.' He wants God to be complicated, contradictory."
Though Danny is based in part on a real-life figure who committed suicide in 1965, Bean readily admits that the character is a fabrication, as is the intellectually oriented ultra-right-wing movement into which Danny finds his way in the movie. But the invention serves a purpose: Unlike the brooding, inarticulate characters at the centers of most skinhead dramas (American History X and Romper Stomper, to name a couple), Danny is a passionate scholar, which only makes his arguments more frightening. "I talked to a few Nazis, and those guys aren't -- well, I don't want to say they're not intelligent, but they're really ignorant. I wanted the audience, Jew and gentile alike, to feel a flicker of what Danny's saying, to think for a second, ŒWell, maybe...' People asked me when the movie was first shown, ŒAren't you afraid of this being misused?' But I feel like, in order to be true to the subject, you have to take that argument all the way. The people who make those other movies, they're afraid, really, to look their characters in the eye."
Bean likes to point out that shooting on The Believer was completed two weeks before Sen. Joseph Lieberman accepted the vice-presidential nomination: "Things never looked so good," he muses. Since then, of course, has come Sept. 11 (the date of the film's planned unrolling in Toronto) and the escalation of Israeli-Palestinian hostilities, and with them a surge in anti-Semitism around the world. For all its tabloid immediacy -- Bean cites maverick auteur Samuel Fuller as an inspiration -- The Believer is a surprisingly agile movie, even more relevant to these times than to those in which it was filmed. (It's not surprising, in a sense, since, as Bean notes in his thoughtful intro to the film's annotated screenplay, he'd been mulling the idea over since the mid-'70s.) More than anything, Bean seems to enjoy the conversations, even arguments, that the movie starts, and they're ones that are well worth having.
