Film Fesitval.com Article

Danny Balint (Gosling) is a former Yeshiva (Hebrew school) student who has dramatically turned away from his religious training and unashamedly plots to kill as many Jews as he and his gang of skin heads can handle. Proudly wearing a T-shirt with a large Nazi swastika and buttons with the symbol of the SS, Balint is first seen harassing and then beating up a religious Jewish teenager, with apparent relish. The secret, which we learn in subsequent scenes, is that Danny is Jewish himself, a self-hating but charismatic hooligan whose uncontrolled rage hides a desperate call for help.

He is attracted to the cell meetings of a fascist idealogue (Billy Zane) and his wealthy patron (played by normally sensuous Theresa Russell as a cold-hearted Eva Braun), and is inducted to the group that hopes to build a new Fascist party with a human face. But Danny can barely hold back his virulent anti-semitism, and in a chilling scene, confronts Holocaust survivors with a swagger and unrepentant air of defiance. While he fundraises for the new Party in an ill-fitting suit and becomes the movement's charismatic young leader, he secretly plots with his skinhead gang a series of desecrations of synagogues and the ultimate act of vandalism: blowing up a synagogue on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

Danny's articulate rants about how the Jews welcome their oppression, how they only find their reason for being based on their exclusion and exploitation of the gentile majority, are delivered in long speeches that sometimes slow the action. But Gosling brings such charisma and intellectual logic to his hate-mongering that the most insidious observations suddenly become more palatable, which is exactly director Bean's point. Aside from the hateful stereotypes of the skinheads, the ones we most dread are the conservative types, in their expensive Armani suits and skyscraper apartments and offices, whose slick exterior hides their virulent racism and hunger for power.

With his true origins as a Jew threatened to be exposed by a crusading New York Times reporter, Danny's inner hatred and self-destructive tendencies boil to a riveting climax, where he ultimately sacrifices himself as the sole victim of the bomb blast in the synagogue which he and his associates have carefully planned. His thirst for killing a Jew is finally met, when he kills himself. Only then does his Jewish soul find rest.

Bean makes the most of his New York locations, shooting in the Jewish ghettos that have remarkably resisted modernity and the slick New York where, as one high powered executive who gives money to the neo-Fascist party, says that "we are all capitalists, and that makes us all Jews." Bean's suggestion that the close-minded orthodoxy of Henry's youth, shown in dramatic flashbacks of his religious questioning being strongly opposed by his teachers, is indeed controversial, and perhaps abit too pat. Many Jews survive the conflict between religious training and the modern world without taking the road portrayed here. However, in its message that orthodoxy that remains closed to new ideas threatens to alienate its youth, Bean makes a powerful statement about the survival of the Jewish soul and the continuity of the Jewish race.

- Sandy Mandelberger