The Herald Review

With lines like "If Hitler hadn't existed, the Jews would have invented. him", it's hardly surprising The Believer - the directorial debut by. screenwriter Henry Bean - has been met with suspicion across the Atlantic. It. earned an outright denouncement from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which works. for the commemoration of the Holocaust. Yet it seems narrow-minded and naive. to. take nothing but offence from Bean's savage examination of faith and cultural. identity.

The central character is Danny (Ryan Gosling), a teenager born into an. Orthodox Jewish family. Even as a precocious schoolboy, he's denouncing God. as. "a power -drunk madman", and soon his relentless questioning of his faith. leads. him to reject it. Indeed, he goes to the other extreme, becoming a violent. neo-Nazi skinhead.

The other neo-Nazis in his gang have just chosen something to hate, but. Danny really knows his enemy: it still dwells inside him. "How come you know. all. this shit?" marvels one of the gang, as Danny explains synagogue protocol.. "How. come you don't?" he retorts. His intelligence exposes the limits of their. philosophy (when one queries the existence of concentration camps, Danny cuts. to. the contradiction of far-right Holocaust revisionism: "If Hitler didn't kill. six. million Jews, then why in the hell is he your hero?"), and yet he's no less. frightening than the swastika on his T-shirt suggests, savagely beating a. Talmudic scholar and plotting the assassination of a prominent Jewish. politician.

Yet as Danny hones his take on anti-Semitism - addressing journalists,. Holocaust survivors, far-right training camps, and gatherings of upper-crust. fascists - a paradox begins to come to light. He repeatedly takes the Jews to. task for what he sees as an inbuilt survivor mentality. "The worse the Jews. are. treated, the stronger they become," Danny observes - and where does that. leave. him and his bootboy friends? If religious identity is strengthened by. suffering,. then Danny's Jewish and anti-Semitic selves are not as diametrically opposed. as. he - and we - had assumed. They're symbiotically related, each helping the. other. to thrive.

Then there's the lure of all the ritualistic paraphernalia of faith that. Danny purports to despise. His enduring fascination with Jewish ceremonies. finds. expression in his strange liaison with Carla (Summer Phoenix), the daughter. of. right-wing activist Lina Moebius (Theresa Russell). She's attracted to. Danny's. thuggishness, but, in between bouts of violent sex, she wants him to teach. her. Hebrew. Soon Danny is a physical contradiction: reading the Torah and Mein. Kampf, draping sacred cloths under his skinhead uniform, and reciting Hebrew. prayers to right-wing groups.

Bean's relentless onslaught of contradictory ideas makes for one of the. most. intellectually challenging films in recent memory. Every assumption is. challenged, every argument confronted. Visually, the film is a touch flat and. marred by overly literal visual representations of Danny's fears and. fantasies.. Furthermore, the parallel between what Danny sees as the masochism of the. Jewish. creed, and Carla's self-abasement, is too crude and literal. However, to. encounter such restless passion in an American movie - and to see such a. dazzling performance by an actor who used to be one of Britney Spears's. Mickey. Mouse Club cohorts - more than compensates. The Believer isn't just a movie;. it's an intriguing, uncompromising philosophical treatise, with more courage. than most of its contemporaries put together.

- Hannah Mcgill