A24
You could consider movies about race and bigotry since the late 1950s as a kind of dialectical process in which America struggles to understand itself. And a struggle it is, with many films burdened with simplistic moralizing, “making us feel” the trauma of the victimized and the fuming evil of the victimizer, and sending us home with the comfortable sense of having our humanist-progressive principles confirmed. Racism in America is as slippery and reductive a subject for dramatic narratives as it is endemically poisonous in the real American air.
Our moment right now, of course, feels like the carbon charge of racial conflict is crackling in a new way. Guy Nattiv’s new film, Skin, takes a reflexive approach, focusing entirely on the violently bigoted skinhead perp in the equation.
Skin sometimes feels like a stunt—are we really supposed to care about these people? But it’s a true redemption story, based on the case of Bryon Widner, a facial-tattoo disaster of a White Power punk who, at the age of twenty-eight, became a father and decided to abandon the cult-like militia he belonged to—and get his tattoos surgically removed, a procedure enabled by the Southern Poverty Law Center and an anonymous donor, as recounted in the 2011 documentary Erasing Hate.
Skin is well-titled: epidermis is the text, the context, and ur-text of what is really the lesion on the national cortex that makes America psychotic.
Nattiv’s film is well-titled: epidermis is the text, the context, and ur-text of what is, going deeper, really the lesion on the national cortex that makes America psychotic. Played by Jamie Bell, Widner’s face is remade into a billboard of Nazi graffiti, in effect reconstituting skin as an advertisement for ignorance and belligerent discontent. While tattooing in the general population is often done whimsically, irreverently, and even thoughtlessly, the neo-Nazi strategy seeks to reclaim the fad-form by making it terrifying and ideologically explosive.
It’s no coincidence that skin is weaponized for these people, just as they vilify it in its various non-white shades—a point Nattiv expands on by flashing forward in gruesome detail to the agonizing tatt-removal treatments Widner underwent.
Too bad the film doesn’t have much more to offer.
Nattiv, an Israeli who’s already won an Oscar for a film about the horrors of racism (a short, also titled Skin, shown in 2018), brings a predictable, and perhaps unavoidable, simpleness to his gritty depiction of the scrubby Midwestern milieu of White Nationalists, who up the game from marches, rallies, and evocations of Viking heritage to actual midnight raids, beatings, and even assassinations.
Led like a toxic family by papa Bill Camp and mama Vera Farmiga, the gang looks authentic but the portrait of righteous pugnacity is one-dimensional; Bell’s bullet-headed protagonist is little more than a blank-eyed cretin guzzling cheap beer and shouting slogans. Is there more here, or is bellicose stupidity the extent of what they’re about? Not to mention, looking at the hero’s doodled mug for nearly two hours is something of a task.
A24
Danielle Macdonald, left, and Jamie Bell in “Skin.”
The tipping point comes with the introduction of Julie (Danielle Macdonald), a dim but fierce single mother of three who’s lost on the fringes of this sub-society, and with whom Bell’s Widner falls in love. (At least, that’s the idea, amid lots of kissing, screwing, beer-swilling and couch-sitting). You might recognize Macdonald, who made her name in acclaimed 2017 indy film Patti Cake$ and has subsequently starred in Netflix’s Dumplin’ and Bird Box. Not the standard idea of what’s considered physical beauty in Hollywood, Macdonald plays the film’s one character not defined by her feelings about skin. Every time she’s on screen, you feel as though Skin has more to say about this deranged subculture, even if it never quite comes through.
Widner’s arc from skinhead bulldog to responsible adult is slow, inspired more by a growing disgust with violence than anything else; it leaves you wishing for the glimpse of some kind of insight that just isn’t there. In fact, his transformation comes with nearly no mention of what’s suddenly at issue for him about supremacist ideology—he just wants out.
Is violent American racism this simple? Is it ideology at all, or just a gut feeling, a biologized sense of imperilled entitlement and xenophobic bitterness? Nattiv’s film skims over the issue, just as the skinheads do—never inquiring deeper, never asking subtler questions, never wondering why some poor people steer this way, in extremis, while most do not.
Perhaps that’s the problem: For most of us, this subculture is an unfathomable aberration, a social abscess without a reasonable cause. You look at the subliterate hate mask of Widner/Bell’s face, and you start thinking of the kind of infectious psychosis that compels copycat suicides and copycat school shooters. But that doesn’t get us any closer to these hominids, with whom we ostensibly share a species.
Nattiv’s movie, then, suffices to preach to a committed choir—an intended audience that hardly includes the Americans it depicts, or, I’d imagine, most African Americans, whose interest in spending unenlightening time with white supremacists must be vanishingly small. Perhaps this is the most we can expect for now—films about racism that tell us, over and over again, how very bad it is. We still wait for the film that cuts deeper.
Now in theaters and on demand via iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Vudu, and Fandangonow.