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The Believer (2001)
The Struggle for the Self (Spoiler)
The Believer is a powerful and thought-provoking examination into a character that has come to hate himself because of his personal beliefs. The character of Danny Ballint is one of the most complex characters I have ever encountered in film because he is capable of understanding the moral implications of his hatred and yet utterly incapable of stopping his hatred from destroying himself. Ballint is depicted throughout the film as an intellectual who has strayed from his faith; there are numerous scenes depicting Ballint's ability to engage in philosophical debate with his elders which demonstrates his selfish insistence on logic over faith. For instance, the memory he replays about his conversation with the Rabbi about Abraham demonstrates Ballint's desire to impose a literal interpretation upon the Torah; Ballint believes that Isaac would have died anyway knowing that his father would have killed him. Ballint's interpretation of this event as symbolic of God's power over humankind rather than in Abraham's faith in God demonstrates Ballint's inability to read with his heart and not merely with his mind. It is an inherent problem within western religious tradition that faith and reason do not mix, that we are always insisting the literal truth of our religious texts over the symbolic representation of a lesson to learn. Ballint wants the text to be absolutely true so that he can be one of the `chosen people,' and when his attempts to bring the Torah to life fail he becomes the persecutor of his own belief in Judaism. Because of this, Ballint exists in a world of tragically divergent contradictions, a world in which he dares God to show himself and then becomes angry when God doesn't.
Ballint chooses to live in a visceral world, one in which he needs physical interaction in order to feel alive. The opening scene of the film where Ballint attacks the Jewish man from the bus demonstrates his desires for physical reality and his self-loathing for not being able to accept faith over reason. Ballint taunts the man and begs to for the man to hit him in order to provoke God to show himself; he wants to know for a fact that God is powerful. Ballint makes it clear that he is looking for the being out of nothingness, and ultimately he embodies the existential musings that gripped much of Judaism after the Holocaust. There are no easy answers for Danny Ballint, and because he can never reconcile faith over reason he becomes trapped in his own solipsistic logic. For instance, Ballint talks about killing Jews throughout the film, but he never carries through with his threats until the end when he kills himself. His earlier two attempts to kill people end in failure, symbolizing his impotence and his inability to take another person's life. And although some may want to read his final act as a form of redemption, in reality Ballint becomes the ultimate nazi when he kills the Jew in himself. His hatred is never about the community or the people; it is a hatred of his own knowledge that God does not do for us what we do not do for ourselves. The ending of the film is the ultimate symbol of a man trapped within his own hatred. As he desperately runs up the stairs Ballint is faced with the truth of his own words: there is nothing left for him. In all, The Believer is one of the most powerful films I have ever seen because it depicts the struggle to find faith in the face of logic.