Slate Magazine Review

I would hate to have to diagram the emotional trajectory of Danny (Ryan Gosling), the prodigiously conflicted protagonist of Henry Bean's The Believer (Fireworks Pictures). He's a Jew who becomes a Jew-stomping Nazi skinhead and then drifts, in spite of himself, back to Jewish ritual "desperately trying to rationalize his attraction to Torah and tefillin from a Nazi perspective. First he tells his fellow skinheads (who have no idea he's actually an ex-yeshiva boy) that one has to understand Jews to be able to destroy them; then he decides that the easiest way to destroy them would be to embrace and assimilate them "thus robbing them of their traditional outsider/victim roles. Confused? Not as much as Danny. By the end he has abstracted himself into oblivion.

Finally showing up in theaters after a short run on Showtime, The Believer was inspired by a real Ku Klux Klansman who, when exposed by a reporter as a Jew, committed suicide. But the movie leaves the realm of docudrama in the first second and rarely looks back. It's clear, early on, that Danny is so obsessed with his victimization that he has chosen to identify with the anti-Semitic aggressor. What is less clear "but remains tantalizing "is why Danny is also obsessed with the Genesis tale of God forcing Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, and its connection to the story of a Holocaust survivor who watched with horrified passivity as his young boy was murdered by the Nazis. My guess is Danny has some Daddy issues that Bean doesn't fully explore; instead, he concentrates on the uneasy relationship between the young Nazi and a group of soft-spoken fascists (led by Billy Zane and Theresa Russell) who have mainstream political ambitions. Somewhere in all this confusion are a bunch of FBI informers and the daughter (Summer Phoenix) of a likely ex-Nazi who sleeps with Danny and is in no time reading Hebrew and lighting Shabbos candles.

I confess I don't fully understand Danny's (or the movie's) zigs and zags, but I was glued to the thing anyway "it has an inexplicable inner logic "and I admire Bean for refusing to settle into any easy groove. There's an angry, searching spirit behind The Believer that transcends its particulars: It might be the most honest attempt I've seen in a movie to explore the sadomasochistic impulses that attach themselves to victimhood. And Ryan Gosling is enthrallingly good. Unlike the skinhead played by Edward Norton in American History X (1998), who was alternately a ropy, sneering sociopath and a conscience-riddled do-gooder, there are no seams in Gosling's Danny. His fantasies of murdering and being murdered are all part of the same unholy roller coaster "and you see the terror in his eyes on the big dips.

- David Edelstein