AMERICAN HISTORY X (New Line) Starring: Edward Norton, Edward Furlong, Beverly D'Angelo, Fairuza Balk, Stacy Keach, Avery Brooks. Screenplay: David McKenna. Producer: John Morrissey. Director: Tony Kaye. MPAA Rating: R (violence, profanity, adult themes, sexual situations, nudity) Running Time: 118 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Making a movie about racism is virtually a no-win proposition. Ninety-nine percent of the time, a film-maker will spend two hours making it excruciatingly clear that racism is bad, inspiring either righteous nods of approval or rolled eyes at the explication of the self-evident. We all feel good abour ourselves as right-thinking people, but we get the point already. What more is there to say if you're only making a cinematic sermon for the choir?
There is another option, which is even tricker: exploring the gray areas of what makes racist principles attractive. It's a risky endeavor -- you might find people chastising you for not making racism obviously bad _enough_ -- but it's the most potentially compelling. For all its flaws, AMERICAN HISTORY X grabs you because it throws you inside the racist mind more effectively than any film I can remember. The center of that exploration is Edward Norton's creepy-smart performance as Derek Vinyard, a young skinhead we meet in two incarnations. Just released from a three year prison sentence, he's a reformed neo-Nazi trying to save his hero-worshipping younger brother Danny (Edward Furlong) from a similar fate. In flashback, he's a revered skinhead adept at recruiting new blood into the white power gangs led by Cameron (Stacy Keach).
Those flashback sequences are by far the most effective, photographed by director Tony Kaye in icy black-and-white. Remarkably, they begin from the premise that Derek and Danny are both intelligent rather than red-neck morons. Devastated by his firefighter father's murder in a predominantly black neighborhood, Derek has justified his hatred with ideas disturbingly familiar from contemporary policy discussions about affirmative action and welfare. Derek is chilling because he's not merely spewing bile and epithets -- he's making racism _make sense_ like a master rhetorician. It's that kind of audience-baiting that makes portions of AMERICAN HISTORY X so disturbing, particularly in a neighborhood basketball game sequence where Kaye masterfully manipulates viewers into siding with Derek and his skinhead cronies.
Eventually, of course, the rhetoric of hatred turns into actions of hatred, leading to AMERICAN HISTORY X's most devastating sequences. The first shows Derek leading his gang on a rampage through a Korean-owned grocery store, terrorizing a black female clerk in a manner somehow more unsettling than the physical assaults on Mexican-American employees. The second shows us the reason for Derek's incarceration -- the murder of two black carjackers -- in a moment more shocking than you might think movies can be any more. Norton is perhaps at his most brilliant in this sequence; his raised eyebrows of triumph as he is being arrested may be the most memorable single moment of screen acting this year.
It's hard to imagine AMERICAN HISTORY X ever getting made without the redemption/salvation angle, but it would have been much stronger without it. Though Derek's transformation further emphasizes his intelligence -- he's forced to change his views when his friendship in prison with a black inmate (Guy Torry) provides him with new evidence -- it can only lead to a great big Moral to the Story. Even more unnecessary is the contrived device in which Danny is forced to write a history paper on Derek's road to ruin, leading to a resolution that feels disappointingly pat. There's a grand sense of Shakesepearean tragedy to the conclusion, but not nearly the intensity of emotion present as we're pulled into Derek's racist world. We get that racism is bad. AMERICAN HISTORY X works because it risks showing us why some people believe it's good.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 history lessons: 7.
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