American History X

There's really no point to the movie. Just a lot of violence. That's pretty much it.

"Danny" (Edward Furlong) isn't making much progress at school so his teacher "Sweeney" (Avery Brooks) gives him a project. He is to document the life of his elder brother "Derek" (Edward Norton) whom he adores. "Derek" was a neo-Nazi - and an active one at that who has only recently been released from prison for killing two men who tried to steal his car, but after spending time behind bars he has begun to question his hitherto unshakeable belief in the supremancy of white people and so once free determines to escape the toxic and somewhat hypocritical grip of "Cam" (Stacy Keach). It's "Danny" who narrates this story as his family marry their more contemporaneous timelines with examples of the brutality his brother raged against those of colour - and pretty much any colour - who lived in Los Angeles. At home, though professing love for his family, he rules with a rod of iron and is particularly displeased when his widowed mother (Beverly D'Angelo) takes up with a decent Jewish fella (Elliott Gould). This brief storyline helps to explain a little of what drove "Derek" down this violent path in the first place and why he is so constantly angry. Might there be any chance of his rehabilitation? This is quite probably Norton's best effort on screen. His portrayal of "Derek" exudes a ghastliness and a loathing that is palpable and would appear to render him a lost cause, and yet he also manages to bring just a little humanity to the character as the film flips between it's timelines. Furlong is also on quite compelling form as his young character struggles between a conflict of sibling loyalty and an inate sense of decency that is struggling to make it's presence felt but that the sparingly used but effective Brooks knows is hidden beneath the façade and the bravado presented by "Danny" at school. It's violently graphic at times presenting an authentically written showcase of the irrationality of hatred for it's own sake, and though not an easy watch at times it does cpome across as real - and that's quite an achievement for all concerned.

You could use this as a skinhead recruitment film because it failed so miserably in the message it was trying to push, and it failed miserably because they were too concerned about pushing the message that they forgot how they were framing the film. So a bunch of skinheads win a turf war basketball game, to stop the gang violence around the basketball courts, and then one of the Black people on the losing side tries to steal the car of one of the skinheads. And then the skinhead goes to jail for killing him. Then we have a flashback where the skinhead argues that Affirmative Action policies that put race before merit are racist because they put race before merit... to presumably illistrate how evil he is. Then his brother reads "Mein Kampf" for a book report and has to write a history paper titled American History X to teach him not to read books that should be banned... like the ACTUAL Nazis banned books. I mean that's not very free speech of them to tell people what they can or can't read. And before he turns it in, he gets killed by a Black kid, involved in the gangs, who took a gun into school. Too often in the film you get those moments where you have to stop and think "Why do the Neo-Nazis look like the good guys in comparison?" That's not what they were trying to do, at least I hope it wasn't, but it certainly was what they succeeded in doing. It's clearly supposed to tell you how the skinheads are the bad guys, I mean that was the intended message... but it doesn't really succeed in that, in fact it kind of makes the good guys, more often than not, with the exception of the prison scene... and people love it. And people love it. That raises a pretty serious question, do they love it for the message that they tried to push and failed miserably at, resulting in the movie making Neo-Nazis out to be the better of two evils more often than not, or do they love it because they faild miserably at making the Neo-Nazis out to be evil? It's sort of like "The Thin Red Line" where they pushed the leftwing message so hard that they made Americans seem like the bad guys in World War II.... when we were fighting actual Nazis and serious Japanese war criminals. They over did American History X on the narrative and because of that the message got lost in delivery.

Despite having a somewhat weak cast, this is an incredibly poignant drama of one man's struggle to live a new life. Probably too violent and close-to-home for some.