What,
me conflicted?
>> The Believer is a strangely effective film
about a Jewish Nazi

by MATTHEW HAYS

The inspiration for Henry Bean’s disturbing directorial debut, The Believer, is such a shocking true story, it’s a wonder a film hasn’t been made on the subject before.

As Bean recalls it, the New York Times received a tip about a neo-Nazi protester who’d been involved with a large KKK rally. It seems one young member of the group was Jewish, or so the Times was told. When confronted, the young man denied it. But upon a repeated question, he said that if the reporter printed that, the neo-Nazi would kill the reporter and then himself. Five days later, the Times printed the story; the young man killed himself the same day.

“Ever since I heard that story, I’ve thought about it,” says Bean from his New York home. “I thought it was really fascinating.”

What Bean has done, some 25 years later, is create a bizarre film about a young and highly intelligent neo-Nazi (played by Montreal ex-pat Ryan Gosling) who is completely wrapped up in the fascist movement. It’s a sensitive time for the fascists in the film (played by Theresa Russell and Billy Zane); they feel they’re close to a mainstream breakthrough. While Gosling is charismatic, his decidedly anti-Semitic strain of thinking alarms Zane and Russell, who feel it may threaten their shift into the ideological fast lane.

Torah! Torah! Torah!
Gosling, meanwhile, plays the conflicted closeted Jew with an incredible depth. As he and his fascist thug buddies raid synagogues, beat up Jews and discuss their hatred towards the Jewish people, our protagonist reveals himself as a Jew. His inner conflict rises to the surface, as he realizes he still has a strong fascination with the Torah, studying it once more as he plots the assassination of a prominent New York Jew.
Ironically enough, the film, which Bean says is “really about hate,” was supposed to have its eagerly anticipated launch at the Toronto International Film Festival last year. But the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. meant an end to all that. “That changed the context of every film,” says Bean, “but especially this one. When we finished shooting, two weeks later Joe Lieberman got nominated for Democratic candidate for Vice President. It had never looked so safe for Jews. Then immediately we’re in a world where it doesn’t seem so safe. The things in the film that people feared might happen seemed more real in a post-9/11 world.”

And Bean says some did feel the film shouldn’t be made. “I had a bad couple of days about that myself,” he concedes. “But in a way, it made the film more relevant. The whole context of anti-Semitism came alive again, all of those fears seemed real, not just atavistic.”

As its subject might suggest, The Believer has some incredibly powerful scenes. After Gosling and company are caught by the police, they’re assigned to some sensitivity training sessions. These involve meeting with Holocaust survivors who describe their experiences to the youth, many who just laugh them off. Not Gosling, who begins to scream at one man for not trying harder to save his three-year-old son, who was literally skewered by a Nazi soldier. The scene is devastating, as Gosling makes the man out to have been weak for not resisting the extreme force of the Third Reich.

Small-minded hobgoblins
Despite the film’s obvious reflection on Jewish identity and the nature of anti-Semitism, Bean insists his film is “not just about being Jewish. It’s about our tremendous appetite for contradiction. We want to hold within ourselves irreconcilable feelings. It’s become a cliché, what Emerson said, that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. I think that what Emerson understood is that human beings are these huge, complex things. To try to take one thing and make it correspond to one single thought is impossible. Things like love, those are the most contradictory of all.”

Shot on a shoestring in just under a month, The Believer has picked up a number of awards on the fest circuit, including honours at Sundance. Bean says he doesn’t think the film could have been made under the auspices of studio financing. “So much of the stuff you see out of Hollywood seems stupid and irrelevant. But when the world began to seem more serious, after 9/11, the stupidity and irrelevance of those films was more offensive. The industry seems to have become even more conservative and timid.

“I put up a significant amount of money at the start, and that gave me a lot of power that I couldn’t have done it without. The only way to do this is to do it exactly the way you want to do it. If you have to start to compromise then it would have simply fallen apart. It would just end up a stupid movie.” :

The Believer opens Friday, Sept. 20 at the Cinéma du Parc

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