flawed but still good

Rating: Null/10 (23 November 1998)

Wanting to be poetic, topical and hard-hitting all at the same time, this Tony Kaye film comes up short a little too often. Still, it can be a powerful and affecting film.
Edward Norton stars as a skinhead who is just released from prison. He returns to a fatherless family adrift in his absence which includes a younger brother (Edward Furlong) who has tried to emulate his bigoted sibling. The film is told in both present tense (color) and flashback (black and white) and weaves a disjointed tale of the possible motivations of hatred based on race. It throws into this mix of skinheads, blacks and Hispanics, a powerful black principal (Avery Brooks), a supposed granddaddy of the "hate" movement (Stacey Keech), a struggling, widowed mother (Beverly D'Angelo), a Jewish teacher (Elliot Gould), and a black stand-up comic inmate (Guy Torrey).
Norton is remarkable, playing both the bravado of the intelligent skinhead who can quote endless statistics as well as impress with his physical prowess in flashbacks and the questioning, struggling con trying to come to terms with a past he wishes to leave behind in the color "present tense" scenes. His acting is so perfect, so intricate, that one might easily overlook how awesome he is here. Furlong, however, struggles to keep the material brisk. Forced to be a impressionable follower, his catharsis is a little too perfunctory, a little too hard to swallow.
Kaye is often weighted down by the ham-handed moments in the script from David McKenna. The film wants to be powerful but often comes across as if it were written by a newspaper editor who cut and paste numerous statistics into the text. It also, at times, tries to be dramatic but fails under Kaye's neophyte direction. And when it tries to be poetic, more often that not, it fails and simply becomes tedious or ill defined. For example, the film begins and ends with water, in particular, waves lapping at the shore. One suspects Kaye means this to show not only the persistence of time but also the repetitive cycle of racism and hatred which is handed down from generation to generation. Instead, it comes across as really just another rather drab and typical way to have an opening credits sequence.
But Kaye can also make magic on the screen, particularly in the more brutal scenes he depicts. The murder in the film's midway point is one of the most shocking and disquieting moments I have witnessed in the cinema. Likewise, his prison rape sequence is both cruel and cinematic. Kaye also makes a dramatic point about race early in the film by shooting a conversation between black teacher and white student in extreme close-up, so that the juxtaposition of their skin color becomes paramount to the moment. Kaye seems more at ease with these moments than he does with poetic subtlety or, worse yet, the tenuous dialogue.
Make no mistake about it, "American History X" is a very good movie. But in the hands of a better director, it could have been 100 times more powerful. With a script editor, a better actor than Furlong (sorry Eddie) and an ace cinematographer, it could have been the most important film of the 90's