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Henry Bean - Writer/Director
Henry
Bean was educated at Yale University and earned a master's degree
from Stanford. He is an award-winning novelist who has written screenplays
for Running Brave (1983), The Golden Eighties (1986), Internal Affairs
(1990) and 1992's Deep Cover. This is his debut as a feature director.
A
Word From Mr. Bean:
After
seeing “The Believer,” a friend said, "This isn't
a movie about a Jewish Nazi. It's a movie about being Jewish."
Exactly.
And this explains, also, why the film never tells us how Danny got
to be that way. In fact, it offers several explanations: his dispute
with God and the rabbis, his absent mother, his distant father,
and, above all, his fury at Jewish passivity in the face of the
Nazis. Yet though each of these makes sense, none is definitive
or, really, satisfying. Surely, thousands of people have experienced
all of them without becoming Jewish Nazis. Why did Danny?
There seem to me two responses to this. First, and easiest, is that
a definitive explanation is impossible. As with a mass murderer,
a nymphomaniac, a saint, or, perhaps, any of us, a character like
Danny is, finally, mysterious. The film respects that mystery by
refusing to pretend it can be explained. After all, what explanation
could possibly seem "adequate?"
But
the other response, the one I would like to make, is that no explanation
is necessary. For Danny is not a freak or an oddity; he is, as my
friend said, simply a Jew, every Jew, perhaps every human being.
Even
if most of us do not become Jewish-Nazis (or our personal equivalents),
we have within us wildly contradictory and "irrational"
feelings. We hate and we love. We hate the very things we love most
and precisely because we love them. And somehow we intuit that this
hatred is precious, that if we stopped hating, we no longer be able
to love as much, that hatred, strangely, is a measure of our passion.
Yes,
Danny is tormented by his contradictions, yet that torment is the
human condition and, to his credit, he embraces it. If it is the
source of his suffering, it is also the source of his joy. As with
the rest of us, his most powerful feelings do not submit to reason.
It sometimes seems they deliberately defy reason, carry him on into
the irrational as if only there can he feel fully alive.
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