A Question of Identity for the Man Behind ‘The Believer’

Writer-director Henry Bean briefly looks around him and then, in the middle of a coffee shop not far from Times Square, executes a Nazi salute. No, he is not mimicking a scene from the colossal Broadway hit “The Producers” just down the street, but one from his movie “The Believer,” about a Jew (Danny Balint, played by Ryan Gosling) who becomes a neo-Nazi skinhead. It turns out that part of the salute, which Bean delivers with his little finger extended, is Jewish inside information. Worshippers use their little finger to point to the Torah when it is lifted up in a synagogue. The only viewers who got this were the film’s most ardent admirers: Israelis.

“The best audiences possible, the greatest audience the film will ever have,” says Bean, who screened “The Believer,” which airs on Showtime Sunday night, in Jerusalem. “What they really understood was Jewish anti-Semitism. It was easy for them to understand, partly because the country thinks about that sort of thing, and partly because the hatred between the secular and the religious there is very intense. A lot of people there said, ‘This is a more intractable issue than the problem with the Arabs.’ Hard to believe.”

For some who’ve seen “The Believer,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last year and won the Grand Jury Prize, it might be hard to believe that it was embraced by a group it ostensibly attacks. But Israelis understood, as some others did not, that hate is the flip side of love.

Danny’s perverse devotion to Judaic minutiae is impressively, almost thrillingly, encyclopedic. Only a believer would be so fanatically well-informed.

Bean, until now a screenwriter (notably “Internal Affairs”), based the film on the true story of an anti-Semite who killed himself after it was revealed in the press that he was Jewish. Bean considers himself uniquely qualified to have translated it to the big screen because of his own identity problems as a Jew raised assimilated in Philadelphia.

“For the longest time, it was like this identity that I belonged to and it had no content except for lox and bagels and this sense of I was Jewish because I was Jewish because I was Jewish,” he says. “I could easier picture myself a woman than picture myself a Gentile. I thought, I don’t want to feel this way. I don’t want to feel locked into this group. I’m a person.

“Once I saw what the religion was, I didn’t feel so locked inside of it. It was as if ‘Oh, it really is something, therefore I can be this and be other things as well.’” So, while Bean was a prisoner of something he didn’t understand, Danny is a prisoner of something he understands only too well. Rather than coming to terms with it, Danny spews venom, beats up a Jewish kid, vandalizes a synagogue and threatens to assassinate a Jewish banker.

Needless to say, these images are not for everyone. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is frequently brought in by filmmakers to vet controversial material, dealt “The Believer” a blow by pronouncing itself against the film. The studios circling around it shied away, in part because of the center’s opposition, more likely because they didn’t think it would make any money. However, Bean says that Paramount Classics Co-President Ruth Vitale told him privately that it could, if marketed aggressively. The timidity, he says, apparently came from the top, from Paramount Pictures.

Bean says didn’t he help his own cause by showing it to the Wiesenthal Center first, rather than, say, the Anti-Defamation League, which later gave the film its seal of approval.

“I think we were stupid for going to the Wiesenthal Center without really knowing who they were,” he says. “I knew [who] Simon Wiesenthal [was], but I didn’t know that [Wiesenthal head] Marvin Hier had been at the Republican convention the previous summer. I didn’t understand how politically conservative they were.” Because the studios passed, the film will now be aired on Showtime, which, is in the same corporate family (Viacom) as Paramount Classics.

The cable showing will be followed by a theatrical release May 17 by an outfit called Fireworks Pictures, which helped finance the film originally and already had foreign distribution rights. Bean has mixed feelings about this. He’s disappointed that a TV premiere won’t have quite the same profile as a theatrical release would, but he’s happy that many more people will get a chance to see it.

Showtime President Jerry Offsay, who is Jewish, says that he was well aware of the Wiesenthal Center’s objections to the movie, but that these were more than offset by the positive critical response, as well as reactions from his staff. He also has a different business model from the studios. He doesn’t have to sell tickets. He merely has to attract attention. There is, however, the wrong kind of attention. The movie, which, as Offsay puts it, is “provocative on the best of days,” was arguably too incendiary in the wake of the World Trade Center disaster. In fact, a subsequent public screening at the Toronto International Film Festival was canceled.

Offsay suddenly found himself wrestling with the idea of postponing the airdate.

“There’s a question of trying to be respectful to the loss that people have suffered and not inflict some additional hurt on them in the short term,” Offsay said not long after the Sept. 11 attacks. “Are we doing a disservice to the film by delaying, or are we doing a disservice to the film by putting it on at a time when people are much less likely to watch it?”

After deliberating during the Jewish holidays, Offsay decided to postpone, releasing a statement that read, in part, “In order to be sensitive to the current mood of our country, we feel that it would be appropriate to delay the broadcast to a time when our audience might be more receptive to this kind of strong drama.”

If all of these obstacles sound like more than any movie should have to negotiate, there’s yet another one. More than the objections of the Jewish community, more than the skittishness of the studios, more than the unanticipated complications of real-world tragedy, Bean was afraid that the movie would not be accessible to non-Jews. Judging by audience reactions at Sundance and other festivals, it more than passed that test. Now he has one more audience in mind.

“My dream is that we show this film to the Aryan Nation,” he says. “I want to see what they think. Because I felt like if you watched it not just intellectually but even emotionally, you’d end up with this weird feeling, like ‘How can I hate them when they hate themselves so much better or more intensely, more intelligently, and in detail than I do?’ And yet their hatred is all mixed in with love.”

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“The Believer” airs Sunday at 8 p.m. on Showtime. The network has rated it R (may be unsuitable for children younger than 17).