American History X

The title changes hands constantly, but here, once again, is the oldest movie in my backlog. It's an older one, from 1998, that I've been meaning to see for at least a decade. Somewhere over the years, I'd seen its two most infamous scenes - the curb stomp and the prison rape - but there was plenty more discomfort in store for me when I finally popped the movie into my PS3 a few nights ago.

Contemporary racism is a tough film subject to tackle. Look at all the melodrama that made Crash the worst "Best Picture" winner in ages.  Look at Gran Torino, which started out with an amazingly honest portrayal of an old bitter racist and wound up with such a wasted, banal ending - and one that didn't even jibe with the established characterization. Look at Bamboozled. Look at White Chicks. (Just kidding. Don't ever look at White Chicks.) Just by making a movie about racism in America this side of the Civil Rights Movement, you invite all kids of scrutiny from different angles. Have you made too many stereotypes? Are your characters unrealistic straw men? Have you somehow "missed the point" or otherwise been tone deaf about the whole thing? Did your movie piss off black people? Did it piss off white people? And so on and so forth.

At any rate, American History X is remarkably straightforward. A devout neo-Nazi attacks some black guys in the process of stealing his truck; he kills one; he's sentenced to three years in jail; he enters hardened, but pisses off his fellow neo-Nazi inmates; they rape him; he befriends a black guy; he emerges from jail a changed man, ready to move on and away from his hatred and his anger; his story has a profound effect on his little brother, who also decides to cut ties with neo-Naziism. There are no frills here, and the movie lays everything out with a bare minimum of supporting characters and secondary plots. There's no subtext. It's blatant and wide open, showing all of its cards from the get go. And I liked that. The movie wasn't perfect by any stretch, and in particular it could have used ten more minutes developing the "in prison change of heart" aspect of the story; merely getting butt raped and befriending one black guy shouldn't be enough to change a hardened neo-Nazi's entire worldview.

Still, it's never preachy. The film doesn't take a holier-than-thou approach and try to explain some sort of solution to racism. It also presents the main character as relatively complex. We see flashbacks that give us insight as to why he turned to neo-Naziism in the first place. In high school, he was just a normal kid. But his dad was a little racist, and then his dad got killed by some black guys, and, well, that was that. The movie just churns along, straightforward and without any misdirects, but then, it's kind of endearing for doing so. Every new scene arrives exactly when it needs to in order to keep things moving. It's a flawed movie, but one that lived up to and even exceeded my ten-years-in-the-making expectations.

Finally, see this movie if for no other reason than Edward Norton's performance.