A gripping but disturbing film about racism

Rating: 8/10 (21 April 2012)

I cannot recall having seen a film in which the two leading actors deliver such stunning performances as those given by the two Edwards - Norton and Furlong - in this powerful but often bleak and brutal movie. I simply cannot understand why neither seems to have won a major award for his portrayal. The film itself is not quite of the same quality as its leading performances. But it is nonetheless a frequently riveting and thought-provoking watch.
"American History X" tells the story of the problems of racism and neo-Nazism in modern-day Los Angeles. Derek Vinyard (Norton) is a young white working-class man who spends three years in prison for the manslaughter of two black men whom he killed violently when they tried to break into his car in the middle of the night. At that time, Derek was the leader of a local skinhead gang that promotes and supports white supremacy. While serving his prison sentence, Derek undergoes a philosophical conversion. He leaves the penitentiary with radically different ideas and is determined to put his past racism behind him and to move on. That, though, proves to be not an easy task. And, while Derek was in prison, his younger brother Danny (Furlong), who was also a racist skinhead, was on the horns of a dilemma. He found himself torn between an attachment to the ideas of his black high-school principal and those of a local neo-nazi leader.
"American History X" is a very good film. The difficulties that Derek faces in trying to turn his life around and those experienced by his brother in deciding whether to hunt with the pack (the neo-Nazis) or to plough his own more responsible furrow are very effectively portrayed. The film contains a number of very powerful scenes, not least the one in which Derek kills one of the car thieves. Despite its horrific nature, it is not gratuitous. What prevents the film from being a great one is that there is an element of preachiness about it. In addition, some of the characters' motivation is rather too simplistic. The film asks us to believe that Derek's racism sprang largely from a homily delivered during a family meal by his father about the evil of positive discrimination on behalf of black people. (Admittedly, the circumstances of his father's death also proved to be a factor.) And I was not convinced that Derek's friendship with a black prisoner and the influence that the latter had on him would have resulted in his reforming his ideas in quite the easy way in which the film suggests. Despite those weaknesses, "American History X" is a very good film that is well worth watching. 8/10.