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.