American History X

I talked over the weekend about doing posts on "more recent" movies that are actually surprisingly old, in regard to the almost 30-year-old What's Eating Gilbert Grape. Another such movie I watched recently is American History X, which was filmed 25 years ago, although it didn't get released until the autumn of 1998.

The movie starts with a bit of a prologue. In Venice Beach, CA, the Vinyards are a working-class family, although at first we only see kid brother Danny (Edward Furlong), elder brother Derek (Edward Norton), and Derek's girlfriend Stacey (Fairuza Balk), with whom Derek is having sex, all in black-and-white as are the rest of the flashback scenes. Since Derek is naked we can also see his Nazi tattoos. Danny hears something outside the house, and discovers that it's a couple of people trying to break into Derek's car. Worse, it's a couple of black guys. As you can guess, someone like Derek with neo-Nazi tendencies doesn't like black people, so when Danny tells Derek what's going on, Derek goes out and shoots them. Since the black guys also had guns, Derek is only convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to several years in prison.

Three years have passed since that night, and Derek is about to get out of prison. Meanwhile, Danny has grown to idolize Derek during that time, to the point that Danny did a report for his history teacher on Mein Kampf, which gets him sent to the office of the principal, Mr. Sweeney (Avery Brooks). Sweeney ordes Danny to do a report on what led to his brother's winding up in prison, and the significance of all those events. Cue some more of the flashbacks....

Some time before the shootings, the Vinyards were a family with not just the two sons, but also two daughters, mom Doris (Beverly D'Angelo), and Dad, who was a firefighter in the Los Angeles Fire Department. But Dad was killed fighting a fire, and Derek is especially pissed, since he believes two firefighters who only got their jobs because of affirmative action are the ones responsible for his father's being dead. So with that in mind it's easy to see why Derek might have turned to neo-Nazis like Cameron Alexander (Stacy Keach) to deal with his frustration.

Except that, as we eventually learn, Derek already had an inchoate version of those frustrations in his mind from before Dad died, as Dad was already convinced the affirmative action hires were a disaster waiting to happen. It doesn't help that in those days, Derek had Sweeney as a teacher, who was assigning some prominent works from black authors to his students, leading to a debate at the dinner table over this and things like the 1992 riots over the verdicts in the Rodney King beating trial.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves here. The movie isn't told in a linear style, but instead mixes the flashback scenes with the present day. Derek, having gotten out of prison, has to meet his parole officer tomorrow and is hoping he can get his old (unstated) job back, looking to move forward. Which means, in part for reasons that will be revealed later in the movie, that he's not so interested in going back to being a neo-Nazi. However, Danny has looked up to that part of his big brother's life, which means that those influences are still going to be around, notably the aforementioned Cameron as well as former friend Seth (Ethan Suplee), working as an exterminator. They all think Derek is just going to go back to his old ways.

I don't really want to go into that much more detail, mostly because I don't want to give away the reasons why Derek ended up the way he did on getting out of prison, as well as the ending of the movie in general. Suffice it to say that American History X is a brutal movie thanks to its difficult subject material, along with very strong depictions of violence and sex. And it's also a very well-made movie, thanks to a strong performance at the center of it all from Edward Norton.

At the same time, however, I couldn't help but feel like the movie could have been better. To be fair, it's pretty hard to make a movie that deals with such complex and adult matters and wrap it all up in two hours, while keeping the characters from becoming archetypes. American History X, I think, gives some of the characters short shrift in this regard, thanks to some weak dialogue. Derek's monologue to the TV reporter asking him about his father's death came across as a thoroughly artificial scene, with nobody talking like that right after their father died.

American History X is pretty high up on IMDb's list of the Top 250 movies, which ranks movies in part on the average rating and in part on the number of votes, and I think it's the latter which gives it that high IMDb ranking. While it's a movie that everybody's going to see and give a pretty high rating too, I don't know that I'd put it on a top films of all time list.