Review: "Brotherhood" Tells the Story of Gay Neo-Nazis in Love

Wow, gay people really are everywhere — even in the ranks of openly-homophobic, proudly violent white supremacists.

I knew this, of course. And making a movie like the Danish movie Brotherhood, about the "secret" love of two closeted neo-Nazis, is certainly a provocative idea.

But it seems to me that if you're going to tell this particular story, especially if you're going to turn it into a Brokeback Mountain-type story of a doomed and tragic love, you have to somehow come to terms with the fact that the entire neo-Nazi, white supremacist movement is based on hate and violence.

Basically, for a love story to be tragic, you have to care about or sympathize with the people involved, and I really, really didn't. When bad things happen to these gay men, they're getting exactly what they deserve.

Yes, I get it: the film is being ironic. It's dealing with the sometimes astounding degrees to which human beings can deceive themselves. The movie opens with one of the closeted main characters humiliating and then viciously beating up a closeted gay kid. And I give the movie credit for not shying away from the characters' disgusting violence and Hitler-worship.

But showing me how people can be pathetically self-deluded isn't the same as making me sympathize with them. I spent the whole movie worrying about that poor kid who got beat up in the opening scene! And when, at one point, a Muslim kid starts to fight back against the Nazi harassment, I was rooting for the Muslim to beat the living s**t out of them.

Thure Lindhardt (left) and David Dencik

It seems to me there are two ways to make a movie like this and not completely lose the audience's sympathies: (a) make the movie some kind of satire of these characters, exposing and ridiculing the incredible hypocrisies of the characters, or (a) tell a story that goes deep, deep inside their heads and shows us the reasons for their choices — reasons that somehow make perfect sense within the context of their lives.

This movie takes the latter approach, but it doesn't come close to succeeding.

Why does the main character Lars (played by Angels & Demons' Thure Lindhardt) join Denmark's white supremacist movement? Well, because he's the object of some homophobic prejudice in the military and, later, he perceives that his parents are a little too controlling.

Um, boo hoo? 

Lindhardt is a wide-eyed, expressive actor, but thanks to the meandering, slow-paced script, I simply had no idea where Lars was coming from. A character can be "confused" or "confusing"; Lars is definitely the latter. Lars isn't particularly confused — he's very intelligent and accepts himself as a gay person. So when he inexplicably joins a hate group, his actions left me confused. 

Lars is initially resistant to the message of hate and violence that his "friends" are preaching, but soon he's beating up Muslims and even outdoing the others in advocating violence against them. Why? If director Nicolo Donato knows, I really wish he'd told us.

Before long, Lars is also secretly screwing Jimmy (David Dencik), the right-hand man of the white supremacists' leader, a creepy man they call Fatso (Nicolas Bro). The softly-lit scenes of their love-making are, frankly, a little surreal, because I'm clearly supposed to care. 

This is a Danish movie (in subtitles), and as everyone knows by now, Denmark, like much of Europe, has had serious issues with very traditional Muslims immigrating to the country and rejecting secular values, resulting in a profound culture clash.

None of that is explored here. Frankly, that would've made a better story: a "true believer" neo Nazi secretly falls in love with a Muslim man, causing him to question his retrograde beliefs. That would've made a lot more sense than this story of a supposedly-intelligent man who inexplicably decides to suddenly start preaching hate, and then inexplicably decides to stop.

Brotherhood's provocative subject matter will surely land it some attention when it opens in limited release next month in New York and L.A. It's too bad it's such a confused mess of a film.