Two Stories of Hatred All Too Real

A grotesque mind.

There’s nothing wrong with fairy tales that dole out happily ever afters. Even as ABC toughs out a plodding two hours of “Snow White: The Fairest of Them All,� however, two vastly better weekend movies taste the culture of hate, mayhem and moral ambiguity in which we often live.

“The Matthew Shepard Story� on NBC and “The Believer� on Showtime--the latter a must-see for those who value challenging stories that get under the skin--project universes vastly different than those of the Brothers Grimm.

Shepard was the diminutive University of Wyoming student who was slain in 1998 solely because he was gay. That case--including the trials of the two locals who lashed the 21-year-old Matthew to a fence and savagely beat him with a gun after luring him from a bar late one evening--is recalled here mainly via the agony of his parents.

Written by John Wierick and Jacob Krueger and directed by Roger Spottiswoode, “The Matthew Shepard Story� is as conventional as TV gets, toggling in emotional swells predictably on cue. Yet it’s also credibly done on most fronts, with good work by Stockard Channing and Sam Waterston as Judy and Dennis Shepard as well as Shane Meier as Matthew.

His horrendous murder in quiet, conservative Laramie seized the media’s attention, making him a poster victim for homophobia and hate crimes, an ugly cross-current that was X-rayed much more successfully, with layered complexity, in Moises Kaufman’s adaptation of his play, “The Laramie Project,� which ran recently on HBO.

Did Matthew’s convicted young killers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, believe in anything beyond their own ignorance and intolerance? While languishing in prison, are they able to reconcile what they did to their victim, leaving him on that rural fence like a crucified Christ figure? When looking at themselves in a mirror on the wall, do they see the fairest of them all?

Or like Danny Balint, age 22, does each see someone he loathes?

Superbly played by Ryan Gosling, Balint is the neo-Nazi skinhead at the center of “The Believer,� a highly provocative Henry Bean film that is irresistible despite its flaws and prickly discomfort. It’s a piercing laser. And Gosling, in the role of his young life, is an electrifying force, his faintly condescending sneer a declaration of war, his seething anger exploding to the surface.

We meet this bench-pressing young hard-body as he harasses an Orthodox Jewish student in a New York subway before stalking and beating his passive prey almost as ferociously as McKinney and Henderson did Matthew Shepard.

Soon he’s making contact with a fascist group whose sophisticated leaders (Theresa Russell and Billy Zane) sense his potential and hope to reinvent him as a mainstream fund-raiser for their movement.

In baggy pants, Balint could pass for a skateboarder. In a swastika T-shirt, though, he struts the streets with menace. He labels Judaism “a sickness,� believes “the modern world is a Jewish disease� and calls for “Germany all over again.� Yet defying the stereotype, he is unlike the zero-IQ toadies in his small circle of misfits who parrot what they’ve been told and deny or downplay the existence of the Jewish Holocaust.

“If Hitler didn’t kill 6 million Jews,� he argues, “then why is he a hero?�

Balint’s is not the face of rage and hate we’re accustomed to seeing on TV or movie screens. He is acutely intelligent. He is articulate. He is charismatic, making him all the more dangerous.

And, secretly, he is Jewish.

Too over the top? Hardly, for “The Believer� is loosely based on the true story of Daniel Burros, an American Nazi who committed suicide in 1965, after the New York Times revealed that he was Jewish, just as Balint encounters his own Times reporter Sunday night.

Also a Jew, yet allegedly linked to white supremacists, moreover, is Marjorie Knoller, who is on trial in Los Angeles in the dog-mauling death of Diane Whipple. Asked in court this week about allegations that she was tied to an Aryan Brotherhood prison gang, she replied, “I’m Jewish,� then added that her relatives were Jewish Holocaust survivors.

As if that would necessarily decide it.

It’s somehow appropriate that pay cable--getting bolder and brighter as network movies get blander--should embrace a story that big-screen moviedom timidly rejected. Writer-director Bean, an observant Jew who is married to a rabbi’s daughter, intended “The Believer� for theatrical release. Despite earning the Grand Jury Prize at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, though, it landed on Showtime because there were no takers for theatrical distribution (although it is set to appear in some theaters after its TV run).

Did Bean’s volatile material frighten off major studios? Did the prospect of backing a film with low box-office prospects? Did fear of offending a special-interest group?

Although “The Believer� earned hearty praise from the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, it earlier got a crunching thumbs down from the influential Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is often asked to vet sensitive movie scripts with Jewish themes. The center’s associate dean, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, found one scene in particular--where skinheads invade a synagogue and rip a Torah scroll into shreds--a “primer for anti-Semitism.�

Yet the intensity of the synagogue’s desecration could not be imparted without the scene that incensed Cooper. And in fact, it plays as a rebuke of anti-Semites, while being pivotal in the evolution of Balint’s conflicted thinking that begins when he is a boy studying the Torah in a Jewish religious school known as a yeshiva.

Threading “The Believer� are flashbacks of him arguing with his yeshiva teacher and fellow students about a portion of the Torah in which God tests Abraham’s faith by asking him to sacrifice his son, Isaac, on Mt. Moriah. Instead of agreeing that Abraham is obedient, Danny sees him as a coward whose willingness to comply generated a weakness and victimhood that became the Jewish identity.

Some of Bean’s images are striking in how they illustrate Balint’s inner turmoil: The skinhead wearing a talis and davening on Rosh Hashana. The skinhead punctuating Hebrew chants with Sieg Heil salutes.

Where “The Believer� flops badly at times is at the script level. The gap separating Danny the yeshiva rebel from Danny the Jew-baiting Nazi is too vast to be entirely credible. Unclear is what happened in the interim to shape Balint as a violent, twisted fanatic full of self-hatred. Just as muddled is the logic of a spiritual U-turn by his kinky girlfriend (Summer Phoenix) and his own behavior with other skinheads when facing a crossroads that defines him as a person. Will he be victimizer or victim? Or both?

You’re naturally hoping for redemption along the lines of “American History X,� the 1998 film about a neo-Nazi (also named Danny) who reformed in prison and then set out to sever his younger brother from the movement. Yes or no, “The Believer� is a troubling, powerful story that merits an audience.

“The Believer� premieres Sunday night at 8 on Showtime. The film has been rated R (may be unsuitable for children under 17), with advisories for nudity, coarse language and violence.

“The Matthew Shepard Story� will be shown Saturday night at 9 on NBC. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under 14).

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at howard.rosenberg @latimes.com.