Chronicle of the Times.

Rating: 6/10 (2 September 2012)

I don't think this is ONLY about Edward Norton's shifting attitudes towards white supremacy or American Naziism or whatever the organization is called here. Maybe that was the producers' intent when this was made in 1997, when some of the public were still hearing for the first time about the Aryan Brotherhood and all that.
If the object was not just to entertain us but to teach us that racist-inspired violence is utterly wrong, the message seems not to have gotten through. We don't have race riots very often but the country is now polarized and angrier than I can remember, at least since Vietnam. The engine propelling that hatred now is not so much race, although that plays a part, but political ideology. One end of the political spectrum is so consumed by anger that the fantasies on which that outrage is based has come to look as anomalous as Norton's original notions of Aryan supremacy. In some cases, it's downright loco.
Norton is a skinhead in an ordinary American family, though he himself is anything but ordinary. He belongs to a group led by Stacey Keach that meets in some kind of garage draped with Nazi flags. Norton's body is covered with tattoos of barbed wire and, featured prominently, a Swastika on his chest. This part of the movie -- the introduction and many flashbacks -- is in black and white.
When a black gang burglarizes a house in his neighborhood, one of the gang is wounded and helpless. The shirtless and bemuscled Norton strides over to him and stomps his head against the curb, removing with one stomp all of the guy's front teeth. He's arrested and sent to prison. Norton's actions sound pretty bad to most of us, but evidently not to all of us. Ten years after this movie's release, a Texan named Joe Horn saw his neighbor's house being burglarized by two Mexicans and called the police, who said cars were on the way. Against the instructions of the police, Horn announced, "This ain't right," took his shotgun, went out on his lawn and said, "Freeze -- or you're dead." Two men tried to run away and Horn shot and killed them, later to be cleared of any charges.
Norton's spell in prison rearranges his attitudes. Initially hostile to the black and Mexicans he is forced to live with, he finally begins to chuckle over a black colleague's absurd jokes in the laundry room. And, with the cooperation of the corrections officers, Norton is beaten and raped in the shower room by whites, in a particularly brutal scene. He emerges reformed and tries to save his younger brother from treading the same path. The scenes after his release from the slams are shot in color.
The writing is sometimes rather clever. Elliot Gould plays a polite, vaguely "live-and-let-live" kind of Jew who is courting Norton's mother. Over the dinner table, the unregenerate Norton tweaks him about his attitude towards the Rodney King incident and is allowed to make some points. (What if King were white and the cops were all blacks?) The mother tries to put an end to the growing argument -- "What about some ICE CREAM?" -- and there follow about 30 seconds of a well-scripted and sublimely awkward silence. But the fight has acquired its own momentum, as combat has a tendency to do. Norton is hijacked by his amygdala and shouts poor Gould down so that Gould must leave the house and the widow he's courting. Norton's extreme attitudes have corrupted his manners at the table and perhaps wrecked his mother's chances for remarriage.
I don't want to go on about this. Norton is actually pretty good. The character's attitudes are ironbound but Norton isn't stupid at all. Stacey Keach is a stereotype and is shown as such. When he laughs heartily at some racist remark, the camera practically dives down his throat. I haven't seen so many teeth since "Jaws." The writers have been careful to indicate that Norton's pre-prison personality has nothing to do with the Ku Klux Klan -- "a bunch of illiterate rednecks." Why not, asks the curious viewer, since the ideologies are almost the same? Well, answer the producers, we don't want to align the KKK with this despicable racist because we don't know how many KKK members are out there but we do know that they buy movie tickets.
I really doubt that anyone learned much from watching Norton's rehabilitation or reformation or whatever it was. We can't identify with him. He's too extreme and obnoxious in all respects. We might learn more from a movie about Joe Horn, his killing of two unarmed burglars at somebody else's house, and his subsequent vindication by the courts. I'm sure Joe Horn had good table manners and loved his dog. We can see us in him.