The Guardian Article

It's not often a rabbi determines the fate of a film. But that's what writer-director Henry Bean claims happened to his debut feature, The Believer. It won the grand jury prize in Sundance, but is going straight to cable TV in the US, so isn't even eligible for an Oscar. Bean holds Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for holocaust studies, at least partly responsible for its failure to secure a US distribution deal.

Loosely inspired by a 1965 New York Times article about a Ku Klux Klan member who turned out to be Jewish, the film follows a charismatic, highly articulate skinhead (brilliantly played by newcomer Ryan Gosling) with an attritional attitude towards his own religion. Danny sets out to test his Judaism in the most extreme way possible - by aligning himself with a neo-Nazi group. "The modern world is a Jewish disease . . . Ju daism is a sickness," he tells his fascist colleagues. "Take the greatest Jewish minds ever: Marx, Freud and Einstein. What have they given us? Communism, infantile sexuality and the atom bomb."

When Bean organised a screening of The Believer for the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Rabbi Cooper took Danny's rants at face value. He described one scene - in which Danny and his skinhead colleagues vandalise a synagogue - as "a primer for anti-Semitism". Bean was naturally dismayed.

"I think the film is almost embarrassingly philo-Semitic, although there is a tremendous amount of anti- Semitic invective at its surface," he protests. "The character is an intelligent guy but he's not deeply sophisticated. I tried to give him the best anti-Semitic arguments that I thought a character like that could possibly have.

"We expected there to be some anxiety, and we were afraid of how people would take it, so we thought we'd go to a major Jewish organisation and show them the film, and that they'd see what it was really about." But instead of giving The Believer its blessing, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre helped to scare away the studios, notoriously loath to risk offending anyone.

Bean, an established scriptwriter and novelist (previous credits include Internal Affairs and Enemy of the State) is bemused and hurt by Hollywood's decision to pass on a film that the Sundance critics raved about: "The studios are even more conservative now than in the 1940s." But that's the danger of making a film in which the leading character's motivations are not clear-cut, and dealing with one of the great taboos in a probing and ironic way. "What I first had in mind was an account of a self-hating Jew, but over the years it elaborated and became more an exploration of the negative emotions we have about things we feel strongly about. I quote Catullus at the beginning of the movie: I hate and love, and who can tell me why? Hatred is inseparable from positive feelings that we have. In some circumstances, one has to give vent to that hatred."

There are obvious overlaps between The Believer and skinhead movies such as Romper Stomper, American History X and Made in Britain. Bean throws in mandatory shots of Danny swaggering round town in his swastika T-shirt, pumping iron and getting into violent scraps. But the film relies on dialogue and ideas rather than visceral action sequences. Bean even claims that his main inspiration was Howard Hawks's classic screwball comedy His Girl Friday. He is also an admirer of John Huston's Wise Blood, which offered a protagonist - a preacher for the Church Without Christ - almost as perverse as The Believer's Jewish Nazi.

The son of a lawyer, Bean describes himself as "a largely assimilated American Jew who grew up in a home where we ate ham and we ate shrimp and we lit the candles on a Friday night and we went to synagogue twice a year and I had a rinky-dinky bar mitzvah. Like everybody else, I had a hunger for spiritual matters, but I certainly never found it satisfied." He keeps a kosher home. His wife's father is a rabbi.

Like the endlessly perverse protagonist of The Believer, Bean's instinct is to question all received wisdom and turn arguments on their head, as his lawyer father brought him up to do. This is also, he argues, a defining trait of Judaism. "One thing Judaism says about itself is that it's a religion of questions, not answers. There is an impulse to criticise, pull apart and attack whatever's there in order to test it, to experience the other side of one's own feelings for it, to keep it alive."

Not a philosophy that Rabbi Cooper would endorse. "We don't learn the motivation of the protagonist," Cooper complained after the screening.

In his own halting efforts to study the Talmud, Bean says that he is struck by its contradictions. "You often find passages where things can be interpreted as saying the opposite of what they seem to represent. This may sound like a 21st-century post- modernist reading of an ancient text, but the Talmud does anticipate post-modernism in a very knowing way."

Ironically, the scene that Rabbi Cooper found most offensive is the one in which Danny regains his belief. When his friends are ransacking the synagogue, he intervenes to stop them tearing the sacred scrolls to pieces. We discover that, underneath his skinhead outfit, he keeps pieces of a Torah scroll wrapped around his body. Bean invites us to see it as a modern reworking of the myth of Abraham and Isaac. Danny might not have to kill his own son to prove his faith, but by throwing in his lot with the fascists, he sets himself something of a daunting challenge.

There is a strain of ironic humour running throughout The Believer. When Hollywood does address anti-Semitism, it generally does so in much more solemn fashion. You wouldn't find Spielberg trying to get comic mileage out of skinheads ridiculing Holocaust survivors, or making a movie in which the jack-booted anti-hero gets all the wittiest one-liners. Danny's arguments are often racist and obnoxious, but it's absurd to suggest the film endorses them. The whole point, argues Bean, is that they must be aired in order to be demolished.

"There's this enormous thing in my life," he says, "which is that I'm a Jew but I've got no idea what that means. Well, I kind of know what it means: if I'd been in Germany, I'd have been sent to the concentration camps."

Bean is a writer by trade, not a film-maker. He says that he would not complain if he never made another movie. "With The Believer, however, I had an obligation to the best idea I'd ever had - an obligation to bring it to life. So I simply had to go out and direct."

- Geoffrey Macnab