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Revisionist history >> A promising premise tumbles in American History X by MATTHEW HAYS
The film, argue some, has joined Apt Pupil and Life Is Beautiful in a loose trilogy of films which evoke racial hatred in an exploitative manner to pump up a movie. The second outrage comes from within the filmmaking ranks: Kaye says his feature directorial debut was crippled by the film's producers and by Norton himself, who Kaye claims wielded too much control over the film's final cut. Norton has countered that he did sit in on some editing sessions, but was no control freak. Thus the folks behind American History X make it awfully difficult to know exactly where to lay the blame for this, a trite, shallow and yes, fairly exploitative look at the mentality of racist youth. The plot is told through flashback. Norton returns to his lower-middle-class home in Venice Beach where his rather sickly mother reclines on a fold-out couch, overseeing the rest of their family. Furlong, as Norton's kid brother, has worshipped Norton ever since he was incarcerated for offing a black man. But what's clear from the opening frames of Norton's entrance is that he's a changed man--he's let his hair grow in, even, and at less than an inch long he looks like some kind of hippie compared to his former shaved-head self. He immediately distances himself from the skinhead buddies who hang around with Furlong. It's clear: there's a lesson he's learned, and we lucky audience members are going to hear all about it. Much has been made of Norton's performance. He is indeed a fine actor, perhaps the best of the latest crop of young talent to emerge in Hollywood. In true method style, he has pumped himself up to the role, gaining considerable muscle mass to play the skin king. He also has a swastika tattoo emblazoned on the left half of his chest. But Norton is hamstrung by History's script. None of this is terribly complex: the time line has been conveniently colour-coded for us--black and white means past, colour means now (what a concept!). And I'm willing to suspend my disbelief for more realistic fare (like, say, Escape from the Planet of the Apes), but the idea that someone could actually be reformed and emerge a better person after a stint in the California prison system is too much to swallow. American History X feels like an after-school special with a bunch of very violent scenes, plenty of racial epithets and a swastika tattoo thrown in. The violence is disturbing, but the rest of the film is so simplistic that the sensational bits feel truly exploitative. The film's closure is perhaps the worst turn, an ending so truly obvious and bathetic it looks like something that should have been tossed out of a screenwriting 101 class. The skinhead mentality thing has been done before, and better (see Higher Learning or the Aussie Romper Stomper). Though the film's message is clearly laudable (hate is bad), American History X can't create enough depth or perspective to give it any impact. American History X opens Friday, November 6
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There are now two major controversies surrounding American History X, the meditation on Californian skinhead youth by director Tony Kaye and starring Edward Norton and Edward Furlong.