American History X

American History X

On a TV news show, the grief-stricken Derek blames his father’s death on a laundry list of far-right targets. But it turns out that it wasn’t just his father’s death that made him this way; it was also his father’s dinner-table talk: Tutoring his sons in racism, the scene feels like tacked on motivation, and the movie never convincingly charts Derek’s path to race hatred.

The skinheads are scariest when they’re bonding. Led by Derek’s brilliant speechmaking and fueled by drugs, beer, tattoos, heavy metal and the need all insecure people feel to belong to something bigger than themselves, their world (the beaches and playgrounds of Venice) is one in which all races stick together and are at undeclared war with all others.

Indeed the race hatred of the skinheads is mirrored (in different words with different haircuts) by the other local ethnic groups. Hostile tribalism is an epidemic here.

Written by David McKenna and directed by Tony Kaye, “American History X” uses black and white for the recent past, color for the 24 hours after Derek gets out of prison. In prison we learn that he underwent a long slow change from white zealot to loner a brutal rape helped speed up the process and meanwhile young Danny (Edward Furlong), Seth (Ethan Suplee) and friends have wrecked a grocery run by immigrants. At school Danny is a good student as Derek was before him; both were taught well by a black history teacher named Sweeney (Avery Brooks), who supplies what seems like it should be moral center but isn’t; perhaps that role belongs instead to Murray Burnette as an old family friend whose bar gets torched?

Momentarily immediate in its moments; photography (by Kaye) that makes Venice look like nothing so much as a training ground for the apocalypse; strong performances throughout (particularly Furlong and Stacy Keach as a vile, sneering gang leader). “American History X” is a well-made movie. I kept wanting it to be more than that: to lift off and fly, as it might have with an Oliver Stone or Martin Scorsese or Spike Lee behind the camera. But it never quite gets there. 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 do they get him into trouble? Or is it a basketball game?

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 here there is a strange imbalance in the conversion process: The movie’s right wing ideas are clearly articulated by Derek in forceful rhetoric but never answered except in weak liberal mumbles (by Elliott Gould among others). And then Guy Torry’s big speech isn’t about ideas and feelings but about sex and how much he misses it. No one makes an effective spokesman for what we still hopefully describe as American ideals; well maybe not around Derek.

Ultimately, we received a bunch of well-drawn sketches and powerful scenes without an organizing principle. Instead of just a plot, the movie needs sweep. And yet Norton, who does a good job, seems more like a smart kid with bad ideas than like a racist consumed by hatred (I think about Alan Clarke’s 1982 film “Made in Britain,” which starred Tim Roth as a genuinely satanic skinhead).

Kaye demanded that his name be taken off the picture as director, saying it needed more work and that Norton had re-edited some sequences; we’ll probably never know what really happened there. But I would guess that the post production patchwork was inspired by a screenplay that tried to do too much in too little time and dashed itself toward a conventional ending.

But let me say this: It’s still a great movie. It’s just that it could have been even better.

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