The Birth of a Nation is uninspiring stuff

The problem with The Birth of a Nation is not so much what the film is, as what people want it to be. Nate Parker’s film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year just a week after the Academy had released an entirely white list of nominees for the coming Oscars. As the #oscarssowhite campaign built up a head of steam, the reaction to Parker’s film in Park City was just this side of messianic.

It was hailed in similar terms as the 1915 D.W.Griffith epic after which it is provocatively titled. There were claims that we were seeing the birth of a new cinema and critics seemed to be reviewing a movement rather than the film they were seeing. Even in January it was already being predicted as the winner of the 2017 Oscar. Trust me, with films like Fences and Hidden Figures around this will be lucky to be nominated.

In the bidding frenzy that accompanied the Sundance hosannahs, Fox Searchlight ponied up $17.5 million for the distribution rights. To date the film has taken a whisker under $16 million at the US box office so, once publicity and marketing costs are taken into account, that’s a lot of red ink for Fox.

Of course, it doesn’t help that Nate Parker found himself defending historic accounts of sexual assault just before the film was released. On the other hand, if that were among the criteria for acceptance Woody Allen and Roman Polanski would have been ridden out of town on a rail long since rather than continuing to enjoy eminent careers.

The reality is that once you strip away the hype, The Birth of a Nation is a film which is frequently mediocre and at best merely manages to be workmanlike. It really comes across as a heavy-handed hagiography which plays like an episode of Roots but without the quality of performance that mini-series attracted.

The Birth of a Nation is based on a 48-hour slave revolt in Virginia in 1831 which was led by Nat Turner. The historical account is patchy but even allowing for racial bias, the real Turner seems to have been motivated by some sort of religious fervour. In this version our Southern Spartacus has simply had enough.

His skills as a preacher have been used by his down on his luck owner who hires him out to fellow plantation owners to calm down potentially rebellious slaves. Nat appears to have no issues with this. Even the brutal sexual assault of his wife by a gang of slave overseers isn’t enough to tip the scales. Nat finally reaches breaking point when he is beaten by his master for baptising a white man. This is the catalyst for a bloody and ill-judged insurrection which claims hundreds of lives on both sides.

We’re on familiar ground here. This sort of material has been covered by Roots, Amistad, and, most recently, Twelve Years a Slave. Indeed one of the biggest issues I have with The Birth of a Nation is its lack of imagination.

We have all of the standard tropes of the slavery epic ; an antebellum mansion, photogenic willow trees, public whippings, whites who are evil or at least feckless, black characters who are universally noble, and - the icing on the cake – Strange Fruit on the soundtrack. Movie-making doesn’t get much more heavy-handed and obvious than this.

The fault here is plainly Parker’s. He wrote it, produced it, directed it, and stars in it and is out of his depth in almost every aspect. The script sees Turner as morally unambiguous, he is upright and honest and without a single flaw. The direction is reverently pedestrian and completely lacking in flair- it’s less Braveheart and more The Passion of the Christ – and Parker’s acting skills are, to be kind, limited. There is nothing in his career to date to suggest he is up to the challenges of a role like this and it shows.

The Birth of a Nation tries too hard to be important when it should first be concentrating on being worth watching. It doesn’t work as ether cinema or polemic. To be honest if it wasn’t for the Academy’s lack of diversity last year this film would have scarcely merited a second thought, it would have slipped quietly in and out of cinemas and been judged on its limited merits instead of being seen as the standard bearer for a movement it is ill-equipped to lead.  

Not fantastic, but still pretty good

I was never a huge fan of the Harry Potter films; they always struck me as being made for the huge constituency of Potter fans who wanted to see every aspect of J.K. Rowling’s world faithfully captured on the screen. There’s a lot of pointless spectacle; the quidditch matches, for example, have no narrative purpose but the fans want to see them so in they go. In that sense the Potter films are not adaptations so much as documents.

As a prequel of sorts Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them starts with a blank-ish slate. Harry Potter’s world exists but it is on the other side of the Atlantic and – since this is set in New York in the Twenties – it is some 80 years in the future. The result is a film that, for the most part, is a very satisfying extension of the world into which Harry will be born. Production designer Stuart Craig has a wonderful time with a steampunk vision of Manhattan and it sets the mood expertly.

This time round our hero is Eddie Redmayne’s Newt Scamander who has come to New York at the end of his journey as a sort of sorcerous David Attenborough collecting specimens all over the world. He has a case full of the aforementioned creatures which are banned in New York. When he accidentally swaps cases with Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), the creatures escape and chaos ensues.

Newt has to recapture them as well as encountering the realities of his new environment. This is the magical equivalent of Prohibition era New York. The magical community has gone underground and is under threat; not only from a mysterious invisible presence that seems to be tearing up the city but also Grindelward, a missing dark wizard who may be heading to Manhattan. The Magical Congress of the United States has its work cut out and they could do without Newt’s interference.

There is much to enjoy about Fantastic Beasts. It is genuinely exciting and thrilling, as well as being quite charming in places; it will have to appeal to children as well as adults. Generally it’s well conceived and the running time of a shade over two hours makes it relatively pacy.

Where the film fell down for me was in a script that tries to cram in too much plot without giving us any character. One of my issues with J.K. Rowling in the Potter books is the amount of overwriting involved, even if she is creating a world out of nothing where everything has to be explained. Even her Robert Galbraith books – which I enjoy immensely – seem a little wordy.

In this film however there is an absence of detail. We know what all the characters do, but we don’t know who they are. Newt’s academic diffidence is overdone to the point where almost every line is delivered looking at his shoes, or at the floor, or generally avoiding eye contact. This gets wearisome after a while; it’s a collection of characteristics rather than character.

There are also rather too many fantastic creatures. They come at you with dizzying frequency which not only stretches the CGI to the limit but also, I think, diminishes the sense of wonder. We never quite get the chance to appreciate them before the next one comes along.

The plot doesn’t hide its secrets very well either. There are no great surprises when the villains are unmasked and there’s a general lack of imagination in the main story. The sub-plots on the other hand are generally much more satisfying and the story of Jacob and Queenie (Alison Sudol) is the best thing about the film.

In David Yates, who did four Potter films, the franchise is launched in a safe pair of hands. However, as John Glen was with the Bond pictures, there is a tendency to be effectively a ‘house director’ and sacrifice imagination for efficiency. It’s no coincidence I think that the best of the original franchise Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was the one directed by the only film maker heavily invested in magical realism.

On the whole there is a lot of hope for the future. But given that we are allegedly to have another four Scamander movies it would be nice if the franchise felt confident enough to take a few risks. The revival of the Bond movies came when they started thinking out of the box in terms of directors and it would be interesting if Harry Potter’s custodians took a punt on a director of vision and flair for the next one.

The figures don't add up for The Accountant

Anna Kendrick (l) and Ben Affleck (r)

Although he doesn't get the attention he deserves these days Paddy Chayefsky was a great screenwriter with three Oscars to prove it. But the man behind Network, The Hospital, Marty and so many others is a star in my book for identifying and naming the ‘rubber ducky’ moment.

This started as a private joke between Chayefsky and his good friend, the equally award-laden director, Sidney Lumet. They noted that oftentimes in bad movies there would be a lull in the action while a key character explained his back story. This was the point where the villain explained he was the way he was, and that he had strangled all those kittens, because his mother took away his rubber ducky when he was three.

While identifying the rubber ducky moment was a source of some amusement for Lumet and Chayefsky, you could spend a long time watching their films and trying to find one without success. Not so with The Accountant.

The whole third act of this Ben Affleck thriller is one long rubber ducky moment thanks to J.K. Simmons – and trust me I am spoiling nothing by revealing this. In common with most rubber ducky speeches, it is long and heartfelt, in short, an actor’s gift – but entirely redundant. We shouldn’t need to be told the back story; it should be obvious from the actions and behaviour of the character. Not so in this picture.

It’s a shame because up till this point The Accountant had been a slow-moving but just about engaging thriller in which Affleck plays Christian Woolf, a man on the autistic spectrum who happens to be a whizz with figures. He is also deadly with a Bushmaster assault rifle; think Rain Man meets American Sniper.

Affleck has been living a double life. A childhood trauma sent him round the world to learn a series of skills from assorted experts; then he remembered he wasn’t Batman in this picture so he chose accountancy instead of crime-fighting. His autistic savant nature enabled him to forensically assess the accounts of some of the world’s dodgiest criminals so they could work out who was stealing from them. One assumes that, rather than carry their possessions out in a bin bag, the unfortunates that Affleck identified were themselves carried out in bin bags, but this moral consequence appears not to have occurred to anyone. Nonetheless when someone appears to be stealing from software tycoon John Lithgow he hires Affleck to do his thing.

Simmons meanwhile is the US Treasury official searching for this mysterious underworld accountant to the point where he pressures a young agent to find him or face having her guilty past revealed. Anna Kendrick is the young whistle-blower in Lithgow’s firm who is working with Affleck to reveal the thief.

There is also a mysterious thug played by Jon Bernthal who, despite his macho appearance, is a living, breathing rubber ducky all on his own.

The problem with The Accountant for me is that the story simply doesn’t hang together. There are four separate plots here which run in parallel and only come together because of the contrivance of Simmons’ rubber ducky speech. The final third of the film is completely at odds with the rest of the picture as it limps along to a fairly obvious conclusion.

An additional problem is Affleck's lack of charisma. I appreciate that this is a character trait here but it is very difficult for the audience to engage with a character whose raison d'etre is his insularity from the world. It is difficult to empathise with Affleck and therefore difficult to care what happens.

Director Gavin O’Connor takes a workmanlike approach but in those moments when the bullets stop flying you realise there is nothing to support the plot other than a bunch of recognisable but generally underused names. In short, it doesn’t really add up.