October 28, 1998

FILM REVIEW

'American History X': The Darkest Chambers of a Nation's Soul

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By JANET MASLIN

dvertisements for the controversy magnet that is "American History X" seem to be selling Edward Norton's buff physique, savage scowl and swastika tattoo in equal measure. So they reflect the film's bold but reckless synthesis of visual enticement and rhetorical fever.

	Peter Sorel/New Line Cinema
	Edward Furlong, left, and Edward Norton in "American History X."

Presented in the ersatz poetic idiom of videos and commercials, this is an inflated yet gut-slugging film that dares to address America's neo-Nazi culture with brutal candor. Its toughest images stick even when its lurid self-aggrandizing spins out of control.

Having made his electrifying screen debut with an essentially dual role in "Primal Fear," Norton now plays a two-faceted character with even more fury. He appears as the ideologically double-jointed Derek Vinyard, who begins the film as a hate-mongering skinhead only to undergo a total personality transformation. Once Derek renounces his past ("Those guys, the gang, that life -- I'm done with it!") the film can consider the lingering residue of bigotry. Not surprisingly (the executive producer, Steve Tisch, was also a producer of "Forrest Gump"), it repudiates the same violence it initially exploited in shocking, lovingly slow motion.

Though its story elements are all too easily reduced to a simple outline, "American History X" has enough fiery acting and provocative bombast to make its impact felt. For one thing, its willingness to take on ugly political realities gives it a substantial raison d'etre. For another, it has been directed with a mixture of handsome photo-realism and visceral punch.

The filmmaker of record is Tony Kaye, but he has renounced this substantially re-edited version of his work. It's easier to acknowledge the heady mix of flash and conscience that Kaye has created, in a manner reminiscent of politically aware hyperstylists from Michael Cimino to Spike Lee, than to know whether suffocatingly melodramatic music, pensive water images and lingering, super-tight close-ups were necessarily the director's own ideas.

Certainly, someone has arranged the film's time frame portentously enough to add extra heft to its slender story. As written by David McKenna, "American History X" centers on a racist killing that Derek commits with horrifying gusto.

It's the kind of film that milks this violence furiously and also tries to heat up this episode by watching Derek in a sexual tryst just before the violence occurs. Though Fairuza Balk plays his nose-ringed racist sweetie here, the rest of the film brims with the tacitly homoerotic energy of its skinhead bullies.

"American History X" saves the details of Derek's viciousness for a shock later on. What it means to do, at first, is alternate between black-and-white flashbacks of his fascist heyday and color scenes of Derek after he has served brief prison time. The contrasts between these scenes are strong enough to deflect attention from the unlikeliness of Derek's about-face.

Though the vastly talented Norton plays him searingly well, Derek is as thin a straw man as the story's other characters, who are conceived as essentially passive products of their small-minded environment. Or as Beverly D'Angelo, playing Derek's mom, says while rubbing the shaved head of her firstborn, "What did I do to you?"

"American History X" provides a jumbled litany of factors contributing to Derek's evil streak, as in a dinner-table conversation about affirmative action with his father, a fireman. ("America's about the best man for the job!" his father heatedly says.) The father's on-the-job death has also sent his son into a fury, as has his mother's way of smoking and coughing, deteriorating before Derek's eyes.

The film's pivotal figure is Derek's impressionable younger brother, Danny, who has a spongelike interest in everything Derek espouses. Danny, as played with wrenching vulnerability by Edward Furlong, is the film's most blatant reminder that actions have consequences, though this is something most viewers will already know.

"American History X" creates several memorably savage episodes that hammer home its cautionary ideas. They have been staged with terrible gusto, as when Derek leads a raid on immigrant workers at a grocery store, or in a killing sure to make even the most jaded gasp. A black-and-white homosexual rape sequence has been so strikingly photographed by Kaye himself that it makes up for the facile nature of the film's prison interlude.

Equally effective in that regard is a fine, funny performance by Guy Torry as the black man who is bewilderingly eager to befriend the hostile Derek but finally makes him see the error of his ways.

Other performances are stagier, like Avery Brooks' turn as the principal who declares: "He learned this nonsense, Murray, and he can unlearn it too. I WILL not give up on this child." Elliott Gould plays the Jewish suitor whose presence at dinner with Derek's mother is enough to send her son into a frenzy.

Ethan Suplee plays an obese, lonely loser whose white supremacy is rendered ludicrous and pathetic. Stacy Keach plays the sinister neo-Nazi ringleader with a taste for malleable young disciples, and he speaks ominously of the way the Internet has become vital in spreading propaganda.

For all its glaring hyperbole, "American History X" knows which raw nerves to hit.

PRODUCTION NOTES:

'AMERICAN HISTORY X' Directed by Tony Kaye; written by David McKenna; director of photography, Kaye; edited by Jerry Greenberg and Alan Heim; music by Anne Dudley; production designer, Jon Gary Steele; produced by John Morrissey; released by New Line Cinema.

Running time: 118 minutes.

Rating: American History X" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes fierce though not gory violence, strong language laced with racial epithets, nudity, and sexual situations, including the homosexual rape.

WITH: Edward Norton (Derek), Edward Furlong (Danny), Fairuza Balk (Stacey), Stacy Keach (Cameron), Avery Brooks (Sweeney), Beverly D'Angelo (Doris), Jennifer Lien (Davin), Elliott Gould (Murray), William Russ (Dennis), Ethan Suplee (Seth) and Guy Torry (Lamont).