Gritty ‘Believer’ to Challenge Some Beliefs

As introductions go, writer-director Henry Bean’s for his new, provocative film, ‘The Believer,” certainly got everyone’s attention.

“If you find yourself offended or appalled early in the film, stick with it,” Bean told the audience at the film, which screened here in competition at the Sundance Film Festival. Then he added, in a remark that drew laughter, “If you find anything remotely amusing, don’t be afraid to laugh.”

By the end of the film, the audience was applauding and they had, indeed, laughed at certain moments in the movie, but it might not be so easy a sell for the picture down the road--particularly for some audiences in the Jewish community.

For what “The Believer” explores in chilling detail and agonizing flashbacks is not only the emergence of a young neo-fascist on American soil whose hatred of Jews brings him into contact with wealthy right wingers in New York’s business world, but how his hate-filled but articulate discourses on Judaism and its teachings ultimately turn him back toward the faith of his fathers. Bean’s ‘believer’ is a Jewish Nazi.

Played with searing intensity by Ryan Gosling, a young Canadian actor who appeared in last year’s hit football drama about racial prejudice, “Remember the Titans,” the central character in Bean’s film is likely to provoke debate within the Jewish community although ultimately it is an uplifting movie about Jewish heritage and a damning indictment of anti-Semitism.

In an interview this week at the festival, Bean said the Jewish community will accept the film if it is presented properly--if they know he’s married to a rabbi’s daughter and that he made the film with the best of intentions. But, he added, “If they go in cold, I think they might look at it and think, ‘Who the hell has the right to say these things in public?’ ”

How tough is it? In the opening scenes, we follow Gosling’s character, skinhead Danny Balint, who is seething with hate, as he spots a young Jewish student wearing glasses and a yarmulke leaving school and then boarding a subway in the city. Danny stalks him on the subway and then stands over the boy, grinding his boot into the boy’s shoe until the Jewish youth, wanting to avoid confrontation, leaves at the next station stop. What he doesn’t realize is Danny is not through with him.

Danny confronts the boy on the street, knocking his book from his hand, then slugging him in the mouth and kicking him repeatedly as he writhes on the pavement. “Hit me! Hit me! Hit me!” Danny screams at the boy as he punches him repeatedly.

Later, Danny and his Nazi pals participate in an aborted bombing of a local synagogue, an attempted assassination attempt of a Jewish investment banker, and engage in an ugly confrontation with the owner of a kosher restaurant.

But after meeting and arguing with a group of Holocaust survivors at a court-ordered anger-management program and hearing their stark recollections of Nazi atrocities in World War II, including the bayoneting of a young child by a Nazi soldier, Danny’s eyes begin to open.

The film co-stars Theresa Russell, who plays a neo-fascist organizer named Lina Moebius, who befriends Danny and seeks to make him a spokesman for the cause. It also features Summer Phoenix as Carla, Lina’s bright and complicated daughter, who is more interested in Danny’s mind and passion than in her mother’s politics.

Sitting down for an interview during a visit to Sundance, Bean, Gosling and Russell conceded that the film will be difficult for some to accept.

“But I think it points into what it is to be . . . anti-Semitic,” Russell said. “Why would you get offended? I mean, it shows it for how hideous it is.”

Gosling then reminded Russell: “At no point in the film do you tell people . . . ‘This is stupid. What Danny believes is wrong.’ People who are not used to being told what to think will have to make their own assessment and some people don’t like that.”

Gosling said that he personally sees the film as “a testament to Judaism. It makes Judaism this beautiful, beautiful thing. If you look at the way all the Jewish people behave in the film, they are incredible amongst this kid’s madness. There is such heroism.”

Story Inspired by a Real-Life Event

Bean said he got the inspiration for the film on a real-life event that occurred in New York City more than three decades ago.

“About 1964, the New York Times got a tip that a kid who had just been arrested at a Ku Klux Klan demonstration at a White Castle in the Bronx was Jewish,” Bean said. “They sent a reporter out to interview him. [The kid] had a very elaborate, intellectual, anti-Semitic rap. Finally, the reporter said to [him], ‘You’re Jewish.’ He said, ‘I’m not Jewish.’ This scene is the one bit of historical record that is in the film.

“The reporter said, ‘This rabbi said you were bar mitzvahed at such-and-such a temple.’ The kid said, literally, ‘If you print that story I’ll kill myself.’ The Times printed it that Friday and he killed himself two hours after the papers hit the streets. He just went back to the Nazi headquarters, put Wagner on the record player, and blew his brains out.”

Bean said he didn’t want Gosling to base his character on the real-life Nazi because the real kid was consumed with self-hatred, while the film’s Danny is more complicated and prone to self-exploration.

Bean said he was encouraged to write the screenplay after a film teacher at Queens College in New York asked him for one of his scripts to give to his students to film. From that request, Bean decided to write a full script. After discussing the film with one producer, and then clashing over choosing a cast, Bean went to Hollywood producer Peter Hoffman, with whom he had worked. Bean also had worked with Hoffman’s wife, Susan, on Barbet Schroeder’s film, “‘Desperate Measures.”

Peter Hoffman agreed to put up half the money--$500,000--and Bean put up the other half. Bean, who has written screenplays for numerous films, including “Mulholland Falls” and “Enemy of the State,” laughed as he recalled that the money he used to finance his film was actually payment for rewrite jobs he had performed for action producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

“I should thank Jerry,” Bean said, adding with a twinge of humor, “although he might be a little annoyed to be associated with this film.”

Preparing the Actor, Not the Audience

For the shoot, Gosling said, Bean had him shave his head and ride the subways in New York everywhere he went for the first month so he could get the rough-and-tumble feel of being a New Yorker. As a native of a small town called Cornwall in Ontario, Gosling joked that in Canada, “if someone steps on your foot you say, ‘Excuse me. Sorry.’ ”

Although Bean said that he made no effort to make the Jewish community conscious of this film, he did show the screenplay to some professors at Jewish theological seminaries and Orthodox Jews, “just to see how offended they were going to be and none of them were deeply offended. Some of them, it wasn’t exactly their cup of tea, but they saw that its intentions were honorable.” Bean added that he intends to show it to a representative of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

The film does not currently have a domestic distributor, and Bean hopes that its screening at Sundance will attract a major studio art-house banner or an independent distributor.

“I think if you could get all of the potential distributors and get the seal of approval from some organization of the American Jewish community and [the distributors] could say, ‘OK, I don’t have to worry about that aspect of things,’ then I think you’d probably get decent distribution.”