Movie Review

Palm Pictures, starring: Ryan Gosling, Summer Phoenix and Glenn Fitzgerald, Rated R, 99 minutes, 2001.

This kid is every confirmation or bar mitzvah class leader's nightmare. He's bright and articulate with all the certainty that only a post modernist deconstructionist adolescent can bring. I've had 'em. You've had 'em. Things probably did not turn out as badly for ours as they did for Danny (Gosling). This is not an easy movie to watch.

The central metaphor is the story of God's call to Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac. For most of the bar mitzvah class the standard and approved answer is that it is a story of faithfulness and trust in God. For Danny (and lets face it, for many scholars) it is a story that demonstrates God's power. For Danny, God says, "I'm everything. You're nothing. I can make you do anything, no matter how stupid"! He challenges God on the spot to strike him dead if he's wrong. He's not killed, of course but he leaves the class and becomes a thuggish skinhead Nazi on the streets of New York. Whew!

But, he's a thug with a difference. He knows the tradition. His hero is Adolph Eichman who also studied torah, midrash and mishnah in order to "know the enemy". Partly because he is bright and articulate he begins to soften and surprisingly begins to reconnect with childhood friends from schul. They are young moderns who have returned to synagogue but with a slightly modern twist. His boyhood friend Schlomo now calls himself Stewart!

Two events signal the turning. He and his fellow thugs trash a synagogue and plant a bomb. This bomb fails as does his attempt to "make a statement" by assassinating a prominent Jew. In the process he rescues the scroll and secretly takes it home and repairs it. He also sort of falls in love with Carla (Phoenix) a young woman he meets at a fascist group. She expresses an interest in learning Hebrew and in learning about the traditions of Judaism. Paradoxically, while he describes "the Jewish disease" as 'abstraction' (they deal with ideas, finance and stories rather than with soil and work) it is when he deals with the realities of trashing the synagogue, falling in love and talking with holocaust survivors that he begins to soften. He gives up abstraction, which he loathed in others.

The story climaxes in a scene at synagogue. Danny has planted another bomb in the prayer desk and has volunteered to davin (lead the prayers). As the moment of explosion approaches he suddenly warns his girl friend and others. They clear the synagogue but he stays. In a final dream sequence he runs back up the stairs he ran down as a bar mitzvah student and meets his teacher who has revised his opinion on the Isaac question. (Isaac actually died and was resurrected on Mt. Moriah). Danny keeps ascending but the teacher warns him "There's nobody up there"!

Apart from the obvious and brutal anti-Semitism Danny is a good student of religion and makes very telling observations that are contemporary questions for Christians; "Judaism is not about Belief. It's about Action". (How very like Bonhoeffer's 'religionless Christianity'.) "Religion is about the incomprehensible; not the idiotic".

Clearly, Danny the true believer is a complex character and one hesitates to make easy comparisons with the Christian story without falling into one's own unconscious anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, I can't help comparing him to Judas; not Judas the Betrayer but rather Judas the True Believer who wanted to "make a statement" by forcing Jesus' hand for the good of the movement. He is not unlike some contemporary Christian zealots who are also prepared to take human life in order to make a statement for a cause.

Watch this movie twice and watch it with a friend.

For another movie on anti-Semitism but one that explores its more subtle effects watch Focus with William Macy and Laura Dern.