Nation Topics - Danny Balint | The Nation

You may recall Insomnia as a Norwegian film made on a modest
budget--do I repeat myself?--about the inner life of a morally
compromised police detective. The picture enjoyed a small but
respectable run in the United States a couple of years ago, thanks to
the shambling presence of Stellan Skarsgard in the lead and to the clever use of locations. The director, Erik Skjoldbjaerg, set the action in the north of Norway, during summer, so that this film noir played out almost entirely in daylight.

Now comes a new, American Insomnia, made to the costly standards
of a Warner Bros. release. Directed by Christopher Nolan in the wake of
his surprise hit Memento, this remake transposes the action to
rural Alaska and replaces the not-quite-stellar Skarsgard with Al
Pacino. A few paragraphs from now, I will recommend this picture to your
attention. First, though, let me talk about a modestly budgeted American
movie, The Believer, since it has the distinction of being a film
of ideas--in contrast to Insomnia, a film of idea.

I care about The Believer, first of all, because its
writer-director, Henry Bean, has noticed a truth that escapes most
American filmmakers: People think about things. For most of us, of
course, at most times, our notions of the world amount to a
discontinuous, self-contradicting jumble; but it's a jumble on which we
may stake our lives. That's why the disorderliness can be dramatic in
itself--provided, as Bean knows, that the ideas trouble the mind of a
compelling enough character.

So here is young Danny Balint, played unforgettably in The
Believer by the whiplike Ryan Gosling. Think of him as Robert De
Niro in Taxi Driver, only leaner, more delicate in features and
infinitely more articulate. Danny hunches and glowers and struts and
slinks through the streets of New York City, his close-cropped head
buzzing with mutually incompatible versions of Jewish identity, his
brain bursting with arguments about God and against God. Danny wishes
with all his heart to be someone other than a young man of ideas--but
it's his fate to be cerebral, which is what makes him so moving and so
horrible. He is a yeshiva-educated Jew who wants to live in the blood,
as a Nazi activist.

Now, I've hesitated to write about The Believer, in part because
I happen to know Henry Bean and in part because I was never sure when
the picture would get into theaters. The Believer won the Grand
Jury Prize at the Sundance festival in 2001 but then failed to find a
theatrical distributor. (According to The Independent magazine,
the phones stopped ringing after a preview audience at the Simon
Wiesenthal Center felt The Believer might be bad for the Jews.)
The filmmakers decided to go straight to cable and signed a deal with
Showtime, which announced a television premiere in late September
2001--not a propitious air date, as it turned out, for a movie about an
intense guy in New York City who plans to blow things up. But since
Showtime has gotten around to presenting The Believer (in March
of this year), I want to say a few words about the picture, now that
audiences may at last face Danny in the public space of a movie theater.

Those who choose to do so will discover that The Believer starts
in two locations at once, on the subway and inside Danny's skull. In the
exterior setting, Danny is a twentyish skinhead, who when first seen is
methodically harassing a bespectacled, yarmulke-wearing youth on the
elevated train. Danny crowds the prey, crunching his Doc Marten boots
all over the guy's wing-tips. Then, when the victim behaves like a
victim--avoiding eye contact, fleeing the subway at the first
opportunity--Danny pursues him onto the street. "Hit me! Please!" Danny
howls. The less resistance he gets, the more enraged he becomes, till he
stomps the timid, book-toting Jew.

Meanwhile, through cross-cutting, we also get access to Danny's memory,
in which he's forever the pale student with big eyeglasses. We
see Danny in the yeshiva at about age 12--just another of the boys,
except for his rage against the patriarch Abraham, who was willing to
slaughter his own son as an offering to God. None of the standard,
moralized readings of this tale will assuage Danny. He insists that
Abraham's sacrifice made the Jews into a race of willing victims,
perpetually crushed by a God who holds them to be worthless.

You see why this stuff can make people nervous. It's not just that Danny
takes Jewish self-hatred to its ultimate conclusion--he takes it there
theologically, argumentatively, with a foul-mouthed, spray-the-room
exuberance that will offend every moviegoer. Zionists, for example, will
object when Danny says the Israelis aren't real Jews--they have soil,
and the kind of manliness a fascist like him can respect. Supporters of
the Palestinians, on the other hand, will cringe to hear Danny denounce
the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. (With friends like this...)

But I'm making The Believer sound like a string of provocations,
and it's not. It's a modernist tragedy, meaning one that's realized with
equal measures of sympathy and irony. When Danny tries to enlist in an
"above-ground, intellectually serious fascist movement," its leaders
(Theresa Russell and Billy Zane) welcome his anti-Semitic tirades but
dismiss his offer to kill Jews. Instead, to his horror, they make him
into a fundraiser, with a suit and a cell phone. When Danny hooks up
with a dreamily masochistic young Aryan (Summer Phoenix), it isn't long
before she decides to study Hebrew, hangs a mezuzah on the door and
starts wearing ankle-length dresses. Yes, hit me! Please! The harder
Danny tries to be a Nazi, the more ineluctably he's a Jew.

I begin to think of Hazel Motes, the protagonist of Flannery O'Connor's
Wise Blood, who is a Christian preacher in spite of himself.
According to O'Connor, Hazel's integrity lies in his not being able to
rid himself of Jesus: "Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not
able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean
one will, but many wills conflicting in one man." In the same way, many
wills conflict in Danny, with that of the faithful Jew refusing to die
away. At one point, in fact, Danny secretly wraps a prayer shawl around
his torso, much as Hazel wound himself in penitential barbed wire. Then,
like any good yeshiva boy, Danny lets the fringes dangle beneath the
T-shirt, which in his case is emblazoned with a swastika.

It's good to see someone take such care with his appearance. Most
American movies these days are little more than fashion statements--and
yet the characters are shockingly thoughtless about their clothes.

So we come to Al Pacino's leather jacket.

It plays quite a prominent role in Insomnia, a movie whose
premise goes like this: Someone in the remote town of Nightmute, Alaska,
has murdered a high school girl. The victim clearly knew her killer, and
the local population is neither large nor highly mobile. Nevertheless,
the Nightmute police feel too humble to work the case on their own. They
send for help--though not from Nome or Anchorage, nor even from Seattle,
Portland or San Francisco. They go all the way to Los Angeles, whose
police department immediately agrees to dispatch two of its top
detectives, despite their being under investigation by Internal Affairs.

I tried explaining all this to my friend Ben Sonnenberg, who seemed
puzzled. "But what about Eddie Murphy?" he asked. "Was he too busy to
come from Detroit?"

Reassure yourself, Ben. Eddie has answered the call, in effect if not in
person. That's the point of the leather jacket.

It's hard to imagine Pacino's character, Detective Will Dormer, going
out and buying this item for himself. It's a little too heavy for the
climate in LA, a little too pimp-chic for a cop who's supposed to be an
agonized moralist. With its supple new leather, the jacket looks more
like something that was recently issued to the guy--which, of course, it
was. The filmmakers decided this was just the thing to signal "cool, hip
and streetwise" for Pacino. In much the same way, they imposed a
symbolic costume on the murderer, Robin Williams. Although the script
says he's vain and attracted to luxury, Williams is draped in something
that says "phony, out-of-touch intellectual": a corduroy jacket.

Don't worry, by the way, that I've revealed the killer's identity. You'd
be able to figure it out for yourself, by process of elimination, no
more than ten minutes into the movie, which is about twenty minutes
before Williams comes into the open. The mystery of Insomnia has
nothing to do with discovering he's the murderer and everything to do
with his somehow being able to deliver a restrained, nuanced,
convincingly chilling performance. There's Robin Williams, taking care
of business, while everybody else is goofing off.

Pacino behaves ridiculously, as he typically does when the script's a
laugh. Hilary Swank has no such history of egregious mugging; but now,
in the role of a local cop, she bounces onto the screen like a young
squirrel on its first day of acorn school. Who allowed these
performances, or maybe even encouraged them? Christopher Nolan, that's
who. He was so intent on dolloping pizazz onto this story that he didn't
notice the visual syrup was drowning a six-inch stack of toaster
waffles.

I'm sure Insomnia will have its champions, even so. They'll claim
the picture is About Something, namely the importance of never, ever
breaking the rules. That's the one, big idea of Insomnia. As we
may learn from life and better movies, it's wrong.

Screening Schedule: Speaking of people who broke rules, Lynne
Sachs has made a fine, artful documentary about the Catonsville Nine,
the war protesters who walked into a Selective Service office in 1968,
grabbed as many files as they could carry and burned them with homemade
napalm. She's got the surviving protesters down on film, Philip and
Daniel Berrigan among them; and she's got other interested parties too,
including the district attorney who prosecuted the Nine and one of the
jurors who convicted them. The juror weeps now, out of respect for their
courage. The film is titled Investigation of a Flame, and it's
showing in New York at Anthology Film Archives, May 29-31. The
distributor is First Run/Icarus Films, (800) 876-1710.

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL

The Sundance Film Festival has been dominated for so long by a circus of cell phones, models, agents and celebrity-hunting media hounds that it has become difficult to locate worthy films amid the crush of tabloidesque media coverage. Adding to the problem has been the spread of indie films aimed at

industry standards, a subset dubbed "Indiewood." This year, thanks perhaps to dotcom crashes and economic sobriety, the streets of Park City, Utah, were lined with a bit less gold, and Sundance reclaimed its birthright as the soul--not merely the platform--of independent film, delivering a full slate of entries concerned with meaning, truth and real-world issues. Over and over, films rejected formula in favor of new styles, production tools and narrative strategies. There were even political broadsides on Main Street, courtesy of the Guerrilla Girls and "Alice Locas." Agitprop messages targeted the film profession: The U.S. Senate Is More Progressive Than Hollywood, proclaimed one; Female Senators: 9%. Female Directors: 4%. The stickers were a welcome addition to the usual huckstering aimed at getting folks to a movie.

As usual, some of the most thought-provoking and soul-stirring work was found in the World Cinema section. The Back of the World ("La Espalda del Mundo"), by the Madrid-based Peruvian director, Javier Corcuera, is a trilogy of injustice that takes its time getting to know, and introducing us to, its central characters: a child laborer and his family and friends in Peru; a Kurdish exile in Stockholm; his Turkish village; and death-row inmates and their families in Texas. They all have names, details, faces. Tilting at the windmills of child labor, ethnic repression and capital punishment, Corcuera wisely favors the individual over the polemical. Utterly free of didacticism, The Back of the World brushes its subjects with the luminosity of an oil painting. It's impossible to exit the theater unmoved.

Far different is the dramatic film Without a Trace ("Sin Dejar Huella") by Mexican director Maria Novaro. She's concerned with freedom, not restraints. Her fanciful script follows two women on the run across Mexico, from Juárez to Cancun. A red car is after them, but is it the angry drug dealer or the corrupt policeman at the wheel? In this breezy road movie, Novaro finds plenty of opportunities to poke delicious fun at the state of affairs in her country, from Vicente Fox's cowboy style to the idealization of Subcomandante Marcos. Its shared Sundance award for best Latin American film should help the movie in the United States, where it's bound to be compared to Thelma & Louise; after all, they were heading for Mexico when they ran into the Grand Canyon.

Of the US films, the most audacious and risk-taking was Waking Life, an extraordinary animation from Austin-based director Richard Linklater, whose previous films (Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise) hardly prepared the audience for this foray into philosophy and psychic phenomena (he was represented by a second film in the festival as well, of which more later). Linklater teamed up with Bob Sabiston and Tommy Pallota to make a live-action film with digital footage of seventy-five people--actors, academics and experts--walking and talking, then engaged a team of artists to animate the footage using Sabiston's new type of software. The result is a film peopled by remarkable hybrids that look like cartoons but move and speak like real folks.

Waking Life's protagonist, a drawn-upon Wiley Wiggins (Dazed and Confused's long-faced star), meanders through town looking for the meaning of life, the nature of consciousness, the difference between dreaming and being awake. People give him advice. "So whatever you do, don't be bored. This is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive. And things are just starting." Stuff like that. Meanwhile, colors and lines mutate on screen. Nothing is as it seems. Linklater and his animation collaborators have clearly had a lot of fun, morphing characters into their own conversational subjects, destabilizing their environs, throwing the material world into question. To extend the fun, the film's promotional packet was a coloring book. Get it? Color outside the lines, or something like that. A fervent tour de force, Waking Life augurs well for the new technologies. If it becomes a hit on college campuses, it just might spark a revival of existentialism, which one character insists has been unfairly pegged as negative when it's actually quite an optimistic philosophy.

After years of seeing juvenilia touted as hip, it was a treat to discover dramatic films made with maturity and restraint, performed by splendid actors at the peak of their careers, written and directed by filmmakers who knew just what they were doing because this wasn't their first time out of the gate. The Deep End by Scott McGehee and David Siegel and The Sleepy Time Gal by Christopher Münch were two such films, prompting their viewers to think hard about both film and life itself.

The Deep End was inspired by Max Ophuls's classic noir, The Reckless Moment. McGehee and Siegel went back to the original source, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's novel A Blank Wall, and made it their own. In their version, the brilliant Scottish actress Tilda Swinton plays a mother who will do anything to protect her gay son--even if that entails confronting a sleazy Reno gay-club proprietor, disposing of a corpse, diving into Lake Tahoe and standing up to a blackmailer. Finessing all her actions with a stunning display of spunk, Swinton carries the film lightly on her shoulders. The Deep End easily deserved the award for cinematography that it won, too: One shot, an image of Swinton reflected upside down in a drop of water falling from the kitchen faucet, aptly captures the watery universe dragging her down.

Writer/director Christopher Münch's task in The Sleepy Time Gal is considerably harder, as he deliberately places his film outside the confines of genre. Much of the pleasure of viewing The Sleepy Time Gal lies in the transcendent performance of the great Jacqueline Bisset, who plays the eponymous heroine, a onetime radio DJ fascinated by the early history of New York City, where she grew up and where she takes her son (Nick Stahl) on a nostalgic visit to upper Washington Heights near the start of the film. As the story proceeds, Bisset's character discovers she has cancer. No, she doesn't find any miracle cure; it's not that kind of movie. No, the daughter she gave up for adoption (played by the undervalued Martha Plimpton) probably won't show up in time for a sobfest finale; Münch isn't that kind of filmmaker. Instead, the film is about what matters in life, what we can and cannot do or undo, the difficulties and mistakes in relating to one another. Ultimately, it ponders how death rearranges all our certainties. Bisset's deathbed scene takes the breath away, especially for anyone who has ever sat vigil watching a loved one breathe their last.

Both The Deep End and The Sleepy Time Gal are evidence of a new intelligence that, given half a chance, could reanimate American independent cinema. Will they be seen? The Deep End was picked up by Fox Searchlight and will certainly be coming to a theater near you. The Sleepy Time Gal still lacked a distributor by festival's end.

The festival's Grand Jury Prize for best dramatic film was awarded to The Believer, a traditional but well-made examination of one Danny Balint, a disgruntled yeshiva student turned skinhead thug. "Love your enemy" is his reply to those who question how he happens to know so much arcane Judaica. In one scene, the increasingly confused Danny is busy simultaneously trashing a synagogue and rescuing a Torah from his gang's defilement. Inspired by the true story of a neo-Nazi unmasked as a Jew, director/writer Henry Bean peoples his tale with a frightening cast of characters meant to compose a right-wing salon of New York intelligentsia, elegant yet all too happy to deploy messengers like Danny.

Judaism turned up in documentary, too. Where The Believer gave us a character torn between faith and ideology, Sandi Simcha DuBowski's Trembling Before G-d documents real-life characters torn between religion and sexuality as they struggle to combine their faith as Orthodox Jews with their identities as gay men and lesbians. Happily, the film has a hero: Rabbi Steven Greenberg, the first openly gay Orthodox rabbi, whose joyousness stands in marked contrast to the pervasive suffering. In what has to be a Sundance first, DuBowski and Rabbi Greenberg invited believers and nonbelievers, Jews and gentiles, to a Sabbath dinner. Some fifty Sundancers took time out from chasing the next hot title to break bread and discuss something other than movies. It was to its credit that the meal felt more like a spiritual respite than a promotional tie-in.

If the search for truth, faith and life's meaning surfaced early in the festival, another, more specific subject soon presented itself. The theme of rape showed up in a number of films--another festival first. While the act of rape is unfortunately nothing new in Sundance offerings, the exploration of rape as a brutal experience demanding investigation and even retribution is very new indeed.

The Business of Strangers, a tense chamber-piece starring Stockard Channing and Julia Stiles as unlikely business associates thrown together by a plane cancellation, uses rape as a crowbar to pry open the psyche. Channing is terrific as a tough businesswoman whose defenses crumble when she thinks she's been fired. She hasn't been, but the momentary vulnerability sets her up for an encounter with Stiles, playing a wild-card beauty who's captivating and unreliable. Writer/director Patrick Stettner focuses his story on an allegation of rape and enactment of revenge. But did a rape ever occur? That's a question that soon comes up again.

Richard Linklater conceived Tape, a much smaller production, as a low-budget exercise in using the new digital cameras. On his one-room set, one man confronts another with his memory of a long-ago rape, and they thrash out their arguments with Beckett-like intensity. Linklater manages to make us pay attention to the story, perhaps because stars are involved: Ethan Hawke as the accuser, Uma Thurman as the alleged victim who refuses victimization and Robert Sean Leonard as the accused rapist turned, yup, filmmaker. It's a wonderfully tense tale, played out with humor and sarcasm.

Unlike Business, with its lush 35-millimeter look, Linklater played up the digitality: His camera swoops and pans all over the room while camera angles stretch the limits of what we're used to seeing. Why? Because he can. Tape was one of the films brought to Sundance by InDigEnt, a new outfit established to finance low-budget films ($150,000-$200,000) shot with digital cameras and intent on exploiting the cutting-edge styles and basement economics that the so-called digital revolution keeps promising. Like it or not--and many filmmakers and critics don't--digital production is already a reality and was ubiquitous at the festival. The documentary category is almost completely converted, as many filmmakers in that world have long since been forced by economics as well as production necessity to give up film for video.

The theme of men confronting one another over rape reappears in Things Behind the Sun, the new opus of Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging, Grace of My Heart), which draws on her own experience of rape at age12 to create a powerful film detailing how such an act can deform everyone involved for years to come. Actress Kim Dickens is sensational as the promising singer-songwriter driven to self-destruction by a rape in her youth. A young rock critic tries to remind her of what she's tried hard to forget, then goes on to confront his imprisoned brother, the perpetrator. Anders takes a hard look at questions of memory, guilt and recuperation. Anders shot her film, too, in digital video and credited the intimacy of the medium with achieving such emotionally powerful scenes.

The most controversial rape debate centered around Raw Deal: A Question of Consent, a documentary that makes the fictions look tame. Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman look at an infamous 1999 University of of Florida incident: A Delta Chi fraternity party went bad, and the exotic dancer hired for the night, Lisa Gier King, went to the police charging rape. After viewing videotapes of the night in question, though, the cops arrested King instead of the frat boys and charged her with filing a false report, claiming the tapes showed consensual sex [see Jennifer Baumgardner, "What Does Rape Look Like?" January 3, 2000]. The Campus NOW chapter argued that the tapes proved rape. The state attorney sold the gamey videos for $20 to anyone who was interested. Once Raw Deal played Sundance, the New York Post splashed it all over its front page, further blurring the hazy line between investigation and sensationalism. In the film, the explicit footage is so rough that voyeuristic pleasure would seem unlikely; Raw Deal is sure to spark debates about date rape, coercion and the limits of individual responsibility. At least as scummy as the alleged rapist is the sanctimonious fraternity brother who speaks contemptuously of King, disses her social status, then is seen engaged in sex acts with her. It's a dark, dark view of both frat life and contemporary morality.

It took a fiction film--Series 7: The Contenders, by first-time director Dan Minahan--to top that toxic level of contamination, this time in the form of parody. Minahan learned the vocabulary of the new "reality" TV so well that Series 7 is a pitch-perfect satire of the genre: It takes the form of a TV show that selects contestants at random, arms them and instructs them to fight to the death. In its Darwinian universe, the survivor is, well, the winner. Series 7 is brilliant irony, complete with television-style promos and wild video-camera chases (yes, digital again) meant to convince viewers that it's "real." At least this year, for once, Sundance itself didn't look like a franchise of just such a program.