History teaches us nothing

reviewed Sun, 07 Feb 1999 21:58:16 EST

Right after The Celebration, I went into American History X, and it was like going from the sublime to the ridiculous. This is the controversial film starring Edward Norton as a neo-Nazi skinhead who goes to prison, sees the error of his ways, and tries to keep his brother from going down the same path. It really wants to be a horrifying, shocking film, and to that end it's excessively violent, but really it's just pretty ludicrous. A skinhead denounces Tabitha Soren as a tool of the Zionist conspiracy (huh?). The leader of the white supremicist gang is named Cameron. Norton fires up his gang to trash an Asian-owned business by... spouting statistics at them like he's leading a high-school civics class. I half-expected him to go all H. Ross Perot and whip out a pie chart. And in Norton's big confrontation scene with Cameron (who looks like Adam West but is in fact Stacy Keach), the only insult that Norton throws that really gets Cameron's goat is... "chickenhawk." Excuse me? Is that some new slang the kids are using these days?  (N.B.: after reading this review, my friend Ed informed me that "chickenhawk" is an insult meaning an older man who preys on boys.  But he said he hadn't heard it used in a very long time.)

It's such a ham-handed movie, and its only lesson is: "Hate is baggage. Life's too short to be pissed off all the time." Well, thanks for that deep and original thought, Confucius. If you really want to see a movie about skinheads, rent the far superior and more terrifying Romper Stomper. Russell Crowe is a lot scarier than Norton dreams of being -- sure, Norton's a great actor with a fierce stare, but he's just too skinny to be convincingly menacing, and he's got a whiny, Steve Buscemi voice that doesn't exactly set you a-trembling with fear.

I might not be so hard on this movie if I hadn't just seen The Celebration, which shows artfully how to shock and horrify without all the histrionics. Everyone in American History X is too over-the-top; every exposition and character development is clunky and predictable. Where it means to make you think, it ends up just making you laugh.

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