Sober telling of a sombre story

Rating: Null/10 (11 December 1999)

Venice Beach, Los Angeles, is associated with gym freaks and other crazy people but Venice itself is mainly a settled, largely white lower middle class community - the sort of place a long-serving L A policeman or fireman might live. The film suggests that it is also the kind of place that might breed extreme right wing reaction to the inflow of other races. The protagonist here is Derick (Edward Norton) a bright young man whose life has been blighted but the murder of his father, a fireman, while fighting a blaze in a black ghetto. He turns to neo-nazism as peddled by the furtive Cameron (Stacy Keach). Sent to prison for killing two black intruders in his home, he comes out no longer a racist. But the past will not let him go, and the cycle of violence goes on.
A gloomy story, but honestly told. A good proportion of the film is done as flashback, in black and white, adding to the austerity of the story. There are some interesting suggestions bound to upset the politically correct, for example that affirmative action is counter productive, that prison might actually have the desired effect on some people, that education is an inadequate response to racism amongst the young, and that some neo-nazis might be idealists, not just thugs, and hence be far more dangerous.