American History X (1998)

(L.A.; the 1990's)

This my be where Ed Norton started to accumulate all that good will he has among film fans. You know he probably is one of the great actors of our age, he can play pretty much anything and takes a wide variety of roles to prove it. Here he plays a really nice character arc, one wider then we’re used to seeing in movies. While the story is not told chronologically, we do get to see his development from good kid, to distraught kid, to skin head, back into stabilized individual. Yet all of these states are most defiantly part of the same character, we can see it through out the performance, an underlying tenderness and love of family, which while sometimes submerged in anger, always wins out.

This is one of the best films about racism I’ve seen, because it explores things in a very honest way. It doesn’t over demonize, or strangely over dramatize the conversion from racist to re-formed state. Norton’s characters racism bloomed in anger over his father’s death, a death apparently brought on at the hands of racial minorities, whom the father had long eyed with a certain, put-up feeling of being wronged. The same process in the reverse worked gradually, there was really not one moment, but rather things learned and experienced over time, particularly through an initially forced association with a likable black inmate. This is some first rate meaningful drama that can get through, I know because I first heard the move praised in high school by kids I had never considered particularly high minded.