The Believer (2011)

The phrase “self-loathing Jew” is rife with provocative and unsettling meaning for Jews. For a people whose shared identity and history is partly tied to having endured persecution and injustice, some Jews might recoil from a sense of victimization that gnaws away at them even while remaining proud of their perseverance. Or maybe I’m wrong. The roots of Jewish self-hatred are open to debate, of course, but the phenomenon is real.

The Believer explores that dichotomy at its most extreme. Ryan Gosling is tremendous as Danny Balint, a bright, yeshiva-educated Orthodox Jew who has grown up only to become a venom-spewing neo-Nazi skinhead. Danny’s contradictions are arresting, if more than a bit puzzling; and like the messiness of life itself, his rationalizations are too tortured to make much sense (thank God for that). But Danny is a fascinating creation, and Gosling does a remarkable job disappearing inside the character’s skin.

Perhaps strangest of all, The Believer is loosely based on fact. In 1965, a Ku Klux Klan activist named Daniel Burros committed suicide hours after The New York Times reported he was born Jewish. From that bizarre case, writer-director Henry Bean spins a story about a man struggling with reverence and repulsion.

Danny Balint is the quintessential self-loathing Jew. Stalking the streets of New York City in a swastika-emblazoned T-shirt, he hangs out with a couple of pseudo-intellectual fascists, Curtis and Lina (Billy Zane and Theresa Russell, respectively), who warn him that the Jew-hating shtick doesn’t play anymore and is bad for business. Danny doesn’t care; his antisemitism is all-consuming.

He extols killing Jews and, in a blistering interview with a New York Times reporter (A.D. Miles), spouts his philosophy of hate with an articulate, almost seductive fervor. In fact, Danny’s rant is tripped up only when the reporter drops his bombshell: He knows Danny is Jewish. The interviewee pauses. If the Times prints such slander, Danny tells the journalist, he will kill himself.

Not long afterward, Danny and a band of fellow skinheads vandalize a local synagogue. While a guy urinates from the balcony and others scrawl swastikas on the walls, Danny bristles when the hooligans trample on the Torah. He takes the scroll home, lovingly repairs it and winds up practicing a Sieg Heil salute while shouting out Hebrew phrases.

To say Danny is conflicted is putting it mildly.

The Believer never received the exposure it deserved. Despite earning the Grand Jury prize at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, it failed to get wide release after it was assailed by Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. That’s what Bean gets for having screened the movie for the rabbi. Like the good book says, you reap what you sow.