Edward Norton’s performance makes American History X worth seeing, despite David McKenna’s blunt screenplay. Tony Kaye confronts racist hatred forcefully, but too often makes the people explaining it sound like speakers at a debate.
American History X is worth seeing for its acting, provided we can accept how often the screenplay tells us what to think. Tony Kaye’s drama wants to explain racial hatred through the people who practise it. Edward Norton’s Derek gives it a compelling starting point, because his capacity for human feeling does not make his racism any less appalling. The difficulty is David McKenna’s habit of turning people into examples just when they need to become more complicated.
Norton understands that Derek must be able to hold somebody’s attention, and his forceful delivery makes the hateful speech more disturbing than simple ranting would have been. We were repelled by Derek, and uneasy about how closely we were listening. It is the conviction Norton gives the words that does it: Derek does not sound as though he is auditioning to play a villain. If he were merely ridiculous, there would be little here to trouble us.
Edward Furlong’s Danny is essential to keeping the drama from becoming nothing but Norton’s performance. Furlong gives Danny a vulnerability that makes the film’s bluntness harder to shrug off; there is a person to worry about, even when the writing starts arranging a lesson. The contrast between the two actors is more persuasive than several of McKenna’s explanations. Furlong gives the quieter passages a human interest that the more emphatic writing sometimes loses.
Kaye is also the cinematographer, and his emphatic images give the men a physical authority that is troubling to watch. Making racist aggression arresting carries a risk: we can find ourselves admiring the image when we ought to be attending to the damage. Jon Gary Steele’s production design helps by making the working-class settings feel inhabited. Those surroundings give the drama some everyday credibility, which it needs when the dialogue becomes a speech.
The weakness is the writing’s certainty that a difficult subject can be made manageable through sufficiently forceful explanations. McKenna is willing to put ugly beliefs into words, which gives the drama a necessary discomfort, but he is less convincing when asking characters to account for themselves. We can hear the conclusion coming, which takes some of the tension out of listening. A drama about racism needs to let people contradict themselves without making each contradiction something the next speech must clear up.
Gerald B. Greenberg and Alan Heim’s editing makes the story easy to follow, but also makes its structure hard to stop noticing. The progression feels so firmly marked out that scenes have little room to surprise us. Anne Dudley’s score adds to the film’s solemn weight, sometimes where the acting has already supplied enough feeling. With performances, images and music all pressing for a response, there are stretches where we need less insistence and more time to consider what we have seen.
There is enough uncomfortable human behaviour here to justify sitting through the lectures. Those drawn to dramas about political hatred will find performances worth their attention, though the script’s tidy explanations remain a serious limitation. Watch it for Norton and Furlong, with the warning that even these actors cannot make every line sound like something a person would say.
