The Birth of a Nation (2/5 Stars)

'There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.

- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

We were promised something and got its opposite. Producer, Director, Writer, and Lead Actor Nate Parker’s “The Birth of a Nation” was supposed to be a radical movie about Nat Turner, the leader of the Antebellum’s South largest slave revolt. But its tone is reactionary and its subject, slavery, has never looked so good in the last fifty years. One would have to go way back to find an example that could compare to slavery’s kid gloves handling in this movie. I was reminded of the 1960 version of “Spartacus” in which Kirk Douglas played the title character. It was an old-fashioned swords-and-sandals picture that showed little of the realities of slavery and found it plausible that a slave toiling in the salt mines could start a bloody revolution against an oppressive state with a movie star’s lack of desperation and the morals of a 1950’s after school special. There was one particular scene in that movie that was especially out of place. The slaves are allowed the company of concubines for a night but instead of having sex, Kirk Douglas lectures his prostitute about marital fidelity. We can forgive Kirk Douglas, as his movie was bound by censorship and the cautious dictates of powerful studios who believed a good pure love story was important to the prudent marketing of a family movie. These are excuses Nate Parker lacks. His reason for making a bullshit movie about a very important subject seems to rely entirely on the movie’s role as an unserious exercise in vanity. He made the main implausible and shaded him with gorgeous cinematography and make-up so he could look good. Most obvious are the battle scenes, which are blocked and shot in such a way that serves to glorify Parker at the expense of historical reality and/or simple logic. “The Birth of a Nation,” is offensive to the memory of all those that were ever slaves.

Perhaps Nate Parker did not mean to make a serious movie. Perhaps he meant to make a straight propaganda film, like the movie’s namesake and predecessor, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 movie “The Birth of a Nation.” Why anyone would want to perpetuate the legacy of that evil movie is beyond me, but like a petulant child hitting back because “they started it,” Nate Parker reengineers several techniques from the earlier movie, this time from the other side. The most glaring is the disgusting sexual argument for racism. In the 1915 movie, D.W. Griffith portrayed black men as leering sexual predators intent on corrupting white women. At one point, a woman commits suicide by jumping off a cliff in order to escape the touch of a black man. (The black man was played by a white man in “bad” black face so that the audience would know it wasn’t really a black man and thus would be not be outraged by seeing a black man trying to touch a white woman.) In the 2016 version, Nate Parker has done the same thing by casting only ugly fat white men and directing them to leer at various women, white and black, like they were pieces of meat. The white reverend (played by Mark Boone Junior) is a case study in an actor doing his best to be as degenerate as possible. This priest in no way downplays his carnal desires, drinks gin like water, and is never seen doing anything remotely Christian. In fact, there is not a single instance of white people doing anything sexually that is not some dark evil thing. And this includes places where it could be the obvious historical thing to do. For instance, Nat Turner’s owner (played by Armie Hammer) is unmarried for some reason. Perhaps this was because Nate felt that he didn’t want to show white people who were engaging in presumably consensual sex but more likely, as an exercise in vanity, he didn’t want himself to look bad. After all, the first act of Nat Turner’s rebellion was to kill Mr. and Mrs. Travis (not Mr. Turner as the movie has it) in their marital bed. Nate Parker has chosen here, in defiance of history, to not show movie Nat Turner kill any of the women and children the historical Nat Turner killed. Why? Because such a decision would have to be justified and when you do that, you no longer have a 1950’s style John Wayne movie hero of a character. Nate Parker probably would have to make the character complex enough to the point where the movie no longer remained propaganda. And that would in turn make Nate Parker not look so much like the risen Christ.

And Nat Turner in this movie is very much a religious prophet. The historical Nat Turner indeed had hallucinogenic visions and he also took an eclipse of the sun as a sign from God and an impetus for his rebellion. Looking back on it today, we may conclude that he may have had some sort of mental problem. This in no way argues that his cause was not moral. But it may help explain why so very few slaves in the Antebellum revolted. After all, the cause was entirely hopeless. Nat Turner managed to kill 40 whites in two days before the whites killed all the rebellious slaves and 100 more to send a message. Rebellion was rare because it was a crazy thing to do.

In this movie, Nate Parker takes Nat Turner’s historical propensity for visions and has decided to make him, quite literally, a “Magic Negro.” He gives him a birthmark, a prophecy in the forest with African chants, and other superhuman abilities (i.e. he can hide in a bush and become invisible). At one point Nat Turner is whipped for speaking the wrong bible verses (the many in the Bible that are against slavery). I counted the whips because at that point I was bored. There were thirty in total, although it may have been more because the movie was doing this fade-in fade-out thing that generally identifies the passage of time. Nate Parker has most certainly never been whipped before. His Nat Turner is whipped at least thirty times and left outside for an entire night. No human would be able to survive that. They would die of blood loss. Nate’s Nat Turner however, heroically decides to stand up at his post and for several hours awaits the coming of his master at dawn to finally free him for medical attention. During the night, all the other slaves put out candles in front of their doors in a show of solidarity. (It's such a stupid scene. All the candles are behind Nat so there's no way the character can see them. Also slaves don't have extra candles and even if they did, they would be too terrified to use them in such a way.)

This is not okay. It frankly reminded me of the bullshit scene in “The Bridge on the River Kwai” from 1954 that had a British general walk defiantly out of a hotbox after two days. The plantations in this movie are about as realistic as the Japanese concentration camp in that one. Why is this not okay? Because slavery happened. It was real and awful and it was not so simple as to be about not getting paid or somebody taking your woman. Slavery was evil because it killed people’s souls, both slave and slavemaster, but mostly the slave’s soul. It is hard to show this in a movie because characters need to make choices which, in turn, defines their character and makes them interesting. But slavery, more than any other system of oppression, limits a person’s choices, and as Vonnegut’s quote at the top of this essay puts it, discourages people from being characters. To show slavery as it really is would be undoubtedly a hard cinematic task. But to ignore this also softens the reality of slavery. And slavery is not a subject an artist, particularly an American artist, should ever take softly.

Nat Turner is quite possibly one of the most interesting historical figures ever, but the choices that man made in real life are not explored in this movie. These choices included, among other things, the decision to not only kill the white people who were sadistic and cruel to him, but also the white people who weren’t, particularly the women and children who had no say or power in the political community of the south. They included the question of Nat’s soul. As a preacher who knew the Bible, he knew that murder was wrong even in the face of wickedness. That is to say, he may have grappled with the idea that although he was avenging others he may have been damning himself in the process. And most of all, he must have known that the revolt would not be successful, and that in doing what he was about to do, he was going to be killed, his conspirators were going to be killed, his entire family would be killed, the families of the conspirators would be killed, and likely any black person who knew him would be killed as a result of his actions. What a movie this story becomes when these questions are taken seriously! It becomes a gritty, desperate, disturbing, horror story of a movie. A movie Nate Parker’s glossy “A Birth of a Nation” is not. Apparently the choices were too hard for Nate Parker to entrust his ego to.

I find it somewhat enjoyable that “The Birth of a Nation” flopped at the box office. It is undoubtedly a good thing and says nice things about the progression of our culture and race relations. Nate Parker, as it turns out, was one of those college athletes that sexually assault women and have their universities do their best to get them off the hook. He was involved in a gang rape of a blacked out college student (He was never charged but a friend of his that was there doing the same thing was). This student complained and he harassed her for several years. She dropped out of college and several years later committed suicide. It took a little bit of time before people realized there was no irony. Nate Parker viewed the women in his life and in his movie the same way. The women in “The Birth of a Nation,” have no characters or opinions of their own. They are used as examples of the property white men take from black men.

Even twenty years ago, this would not have mattered so much. If a black man was spiting white people it was okay to throw a woman under the bus to allow him to keep doing it (cough, O.J. cough, cough). But opportunity, particularly in the film industry whose production costs have plummeted allowing many people who were on the sidelines to now make quality films or, more likely, television, has expanded to the point where it seems we are no longer obligated to like a black film (whatever that means given that films are generally made by the collaboration of hundreds of people, but let’s apply it here) simply because it exists. We judge it as an equal like any other. So in light of a more fair and just society, Nate Parker, your movie sucks.