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American History X shows how two Los Angeles brothers are drawn
into a neo-Nazi skinhead gang, and why one decides to free himself. In
telling their stories, the film employs the language of racism--the
gutter variety and more sophisticated variations. The film is always
interesting and sometimes compelling, and it contains more actual
provocative thought than any American film on race since Do the Right
Thing. But in trying to resolve the events of four years in one day,
it leaves its shortcuts showing.
The film stars Edward Norton as Derek, a bright kid who has become
the leader of a skinhead pack in Venice Beach, Calif.; he's the
lieutenant of a shadowy adult neo-Nazi (Stacy Keach). One night two
black kids attempt to steal Derek's car, as the result of a playground
feud, and he shoots them dead. He's convicted of murder and sent to
prison for three years.
His kid brother Danny (Edward Furlong) idolizes him, and to some
degree steps into his shoes--although he lacks Derek's intelligence and
gift for rabble-rousing rhetoric. Then Derek gets out of prison and
tries to find a new direction for himself and Danny. Their backdrop is
a family that consists of a chronically sick mother (Beverly D'Angelo)
and two sisters. Their father, a fireman, was shot and killed by black
addicts while fighting a fire in a crack house in a black neighborhood.
On a TV news show, the grief-stricken Derek blames his father's
death on a laundry list of far-right targets. Later we learn it wasn't
just his father's death that shaped him, but his father's dinner table
conversation; his father tutors him in racism, but the scene feels like
tacked-on motivation, and the movie never convincingly charts Derek's
path to race hatred.
The scariest and most convincing scenes are the ones in which we see
the skinheads bonding. They're led by Derek's brilliant speechmaking
and fueled by drugs, beer, tattoos, heavy metal and the need all
insecure people feel to belong to a movement greater than themselves.
It is assumed in their world (the beaches and playgrounds of the Venice
area of L.A.) that all races stick together and are at undeclared war
with all others.
Indeed the race hatred of the skinheads is mirrored (with different
words and haircuts) by the other local ethnic groups. Hostile tribalism
is an epidemic here.
The film, written by David McKenna and directed by Tony Kaye, uses
black and white to show the recent past, and color to show the 24-hour
period after Derek is released from prison. In prison, we learn, Derek
underwent a slow transition from a white zealot to a loner--a brutal
rape helped speed the process. Meanwhile, young Danny and his friends
(including a massive guy named Seth, played by Ethan Suplee) wreck a
grocery run by immigrants. At school, Danny is a good student, as Derek
was before him; both are taught by a black history teacher named
Sweeney (Avery Brooks), who supplies the moral center of the film.
In the immediacy of its moments, in the photography (by Kaye) that
makes Venice look like a training ground for the apocalypse, and in the
strength of the performances, American History X' is a well-made
film. I kept hoping it would be more--that it would lift off and fly,
as it might have with a director like Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese or
Spike Lee. But it never quite does. Its underlying structure is too
apparent, and there are scenes where we sense the movie hurrying to
touch its bases.
One crucially underdeveloped area is Derek's prison experience. With
a swastika tattooed on his chest, he fits in at first with the white
power faction, but is disillusioned to find that all the major groups
in prison (black, Hispanics, white) have a working agreement; that's
too much cooperation for him. Fine, but is it that, or a crucial
basketball game, that gets him into trouble? Not clear.
He's assigned to the laundry, where his black co-worker (Guy Torry,
in a wonderful performance) gradually--well, begins to seem human to
him. But there's a strange imbalance in the conversion process. The
movie's right-wing ideas are clearly articulated by Derek in forceful
rhetoric, but are never answered except in weak liberal mumbles (by a
Jewish teacher played by Elliott Gould, among others). And then the
black laundry worker's big speech is not about ideas and feelings, but
about sex and how much he misses it. There is no effective spokesman
for what we might still hopefully describe as American ideals. Well,
maybe Derek wouldn't find one in his circles.
What we get, finally, is a series of well-drawn sketches and
powerful scenes, in search of an organizing principle. The movie needs
sweep where it only has plot. And Norton, effective as he is, comes
across more as a bright kid with bad ideas than as a racist burning
with hate. (I am reminded of Tim Roth's truly satanic skinhead in
``Made in Britain,'' a 1982 film by Alan Clarke.)
Kaye wanted to have his name removed as the film's director, arguing
that the film needed more work and that Norton re-edited some
sequences. We will probably never know the truth behind the
controversy. My guess is that the post-production repairs were inspired
by a screenplay that attempted to cover too much ground in too little
time and yet hastens to a conventional conclusion.
Still, I must be clear: This is a good and powerful film. If I am
dissatisfied, it is because it contains the promise of being more than
it is.
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