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.
