The Believer, an independent feature, premiered on cable nearly three months ago, after failing to get a distributor. But it was recently picked up and is opening this week at Landmark’s Century Centre. It’s already created a good deal of buzz, most of it justified.
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Bean’s published screenplay describes him as “a successful screenwriter whose credits include such major motion pictures as Internal Affairs…and Enemy of the State.” For me, Bean’s principal claims to fame are his writing credits on three relatively “minor” and “unsuccessful” but uncommonly good features: Chantal Akerman’s musicals Window Shopping and The Golden 80s (both 1986) and Bill Duke’s political crime thriller Deep Cover (1992), which Bean also produced. Deep Cover was a commercial success, but what it had to say about the hypocrisy of George Bush Sr.’s “war on drugs” was so scathing and accurate that it was mainly ignored by the press (a similarly scathing and accurate picture about George Bush Jr.’s “war on terrorism,” assuming it could be bankrolled and shown, would likely be ignored by the same people today).
Just after this opening, while the credits are still fitfully appearing, we see Danny follow and harass a studious-looking Orthodox Jewish youth on the subway and street, finally knocking him down and kicking him while screaming, “Get up! Get the fuck up!…Hit me, hit me—please!” It’s obvious that the victim’s refusal to hit back is what riles Danny the most—no doubt connecting with his anger that Abraham agrees to sacrifice his son Isaac at God’s command rather than protest—but the degree to which Danny’s beef is philosophical rather than simply oedipal is never spelled out. (Over the course of the movie we catch only a few glimpses of Danny with his father at home, all of them brief and unenlightening, and just about the only thing we learn about his mother is that she’s absent.)
Fuller also avoided trying to account for racism through psychological profiling, apart from the most obvious kind of conditioning, like that in White Dog—another reason The Believer is Fuller-esque in the best sense, stylistically as well as thematically, drawing on a wide range of expressive possibilities in its use of sound and image. The troubled and troubling sound montage heard over the final credits—music, dialogue, whispers, even the sound of a shofar—is even more suggestive than the juxtapositions at the beginning, because the multiple rhyme effects are ultimately more musical than explanatory, at least in any conclusive way. Danny’s boyhood challenge to God to strike him dead is echoed by his implied suicide as a young adult, though his early anger scarcely accounts for it.
Directed by Henry Bean
Written by Bean and Mark Jacobson
With Ryan Gosling, Summer Phoenix, Theresa Russell, Billy Zane, A.D. Miles, Glenn Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Reaser, and Dean Strober.
