Harry Bean’s film The Believer is “based on a true story”, but it’s not one of those movies (the Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind would be one) that wants the stamp of authenticity while reserving the right to distort the facts for the sake of dramatic impact.
Rather, The Believer is an attempt to take a fascinating news item and open it up to imaginative investigation. Its basis is the case of Daniel Burros, a member of the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan, who committed suicide when it was revealed that he was in fact Jewish. This took place in the 1960s, but Bean has updated the story to what seems closer to the present day, and told it from the perspective of the contradictory central figure himself, here renamed Daniel Balint.
Yet the fact that the movie is “based on a true story” is important — we need the underpinning of real events to assure us that this isn’t simply a provocative gamble designed to outrage delicate sensibilities. Such a project would not necessarily be a bad thing, but it would have to work very hard to convince as a purely fictional tale. But there it is: it happened, a Jew joined a neo-Nazi movement, and not for reasons of self-preservation. (In fact, a similar thing happened in South Africa too.) Now the interesting task is to try to tell the story in a way that makes sense of it.
Bean does not give us much in the way of background detail. (Where, for instance, is Daniel’s mother? Dead? In a Jewish story, this is surely important.) We aren’t told in narrative terms how Danny got from the yeshiva to preaching the elimination of world Jewry — it can’t have been that boring in Bible class. Bean fills the gap with Danny’s tortured ideological fantasies and self-justifications, his arguments with his religion and culture, his battle with the history of the Holocaust, and finally with himself.
To present such a person is tricky. He’s like an atheist who can’t forgive God for never having existed. And The Believer is, it seems to me, a very Jewish movie. The exquisite rabbinical interpretive strategies that elaborate Biblical texts into a system of observance and belief also enable the deconstruction of the very basis of faith. (That, for instance, is why so few Christians bother to read all of their Bible with serious attention; it actually undermines belief.) Danny’s questioning of his religious tradition is, in that respect, very much part of that tradition, and his continuing refinements of the question of what the Jew means to Western civilisation shows that, at heart, he’s still the yeshiva boy with a taste for obscure midrashim.
All this would work better in a theological seminar than as a movie were it not for Bean’s lead actor. Bean is tiptoeing on the edge of credibility, but Ryan Gosling makes it work. He plays Danny with incandescent intensity.
Not only is his physical presence imposing, with its constant threat of violence, but the spiritual and intellectual turmoil of his inner life is constantly visible on his remarkable face. The aquiline nose is contradicted by the shaved head, the sensitively questing eyes by the lips’ quivering contempt. Gosling is capable of looking belligerent and wounded at the same time. As Danny, you detest him, fear him, and feel desperately sorry for him. You can’t take your eyes off him.
He is well supported by the likes of Billy Zane, Theresa Russell and Summer Phoenix, though the lastnamed is a rather enigmatic figure.
The Believer is one of those rare movies that can modulate from the shocking to the moving. The scene in which Danny’s and his fellow skinheads are confronted by a handful of Holocaust survivors brings tears to the eyes in a way Steven Spielberg needs millions of dollars and a large maudlin orchestra to achieve.