Nate Parker (2016)
This year’s #OscarsSoWhite controversy immediately foretold anxious corrective action in next year’s Academy Awards. Throughout 2016, there’s been no shortage of potential beneficiaries – Fences, Loving, Moonlight, A United Kingdom. Things change, of course. While Fences and Moonlight look set not only to be nominated for Oscars but to win one or two, A United Kingdom won’t be doing either (not this year anyway: its US release date has been put back to February 2017). Hidden Figures has now joined the list of contenders. None of these films, however, has experienced the vicissitudes of The Birth of a Nation, directed and written by and starring Nate Parker.
The film premiered in January at the Sundance festival, which opened a week after the announcement of the Oscar nominations. Sundance ended with The Birth of a Nation winning both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award for drama. Parker’s movie commemorates the life of Nat Turner, who led a slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia in 1831. The movie’s title, a century on from D W Griffith’s film of the same name, is a political statement – perhaps even a declaration of intent to be mentioned in the same breath as Griffith’s notorious classic. The $17.5m paid by Fox Searchlight for the worldwide rights to The Birth of a Nation represents the biggest deal ever struck at Sundance. Two months after opening in North American cinemas, the film has box-office takings approaching double its $8.5m budget; since it’s been released subsequently in only a few other countries to date, describing the film, as some American publications have, as a commercial flop seems an overstatement. Nevertheless, the box-office performance clearly is much less strong than Fox Searchlight expected back in January and the movie is conspicuous by its absence from most awards slates. It opened quietly in the UK at the beginning of this month.
It’s widely assumed that a major factor in what’s happened has been the renewed media coverage during the summer of the rape charges brought in 1999 against Nate Parker and his friend Jean McGianni Celestin, who shares with Parker the story credit for The Birth of a Nation, when they were students at Pennsylvania State University. Parker was acquitted of the charges; Celestin was initially convicted of sexual assault but the conviction was later overturned on appeal. There was no retrial because the alleged victim preferred not to testify again. The young woman concerned committed suicide in 2012. When the story resurfaced in August this year, a particular bone of contention was Parker’s inclusion in The Birth of a Nation of a brutal rape which has no basis in historical record.
It would be unfortunate, though understandable, if people have stayed away because of this negative publicity, or if lukewarm reviews of the film were influenced by the scandal and affected audience numbers. It would also be unfortunate, though, if this is came to be accepted as the sole reason for The Birth of a Nation’s reversal of fortune. This January, the movie was in the right place at the right time; nine months later, it was easier to take a more considered view of its merits and demerits and the fact is, it’s a pretty bad film. It’s also an undeniably ambitious one but Nate Parker took on one role too many when he decided to play the lead. His characterisation lacks evidence of the combination of mobile intelligence and religious faith that it seems drove Nat Turner. Parker’s pictorial performance is camera-conscious in a particular way: he seems to have one eye – a director’s eye – on how he’s going to look in rushes.
It’s a safe bet that none of the cast of The Birth of a Nation, black or white, will feature in next month’s Oscar nominations. Most of the acting is too deliberate, with reactions often obviously produced and finished, though there’s some good work from Aja Naomi King, as Nat’s wife, Aunjanue Ellis, as his mother, and Penelope Ann Miller. The latter plays the mother in the plantation-owning family – she enables the boy Nat to learn to read and write, and her son Samuel (Griffin Freeman) and Nat (Tony Espinosa) are boyhood friends. When they’re men, Nat’s abilities as a preacher are some help to Samuel in alleviating his increasing financial difficulties running the plantation. The pair travel together to neighbouring plantations in Southampton County, where Nat’s homilies are used to encourage unruly slaves to accept their lot. Armie Hammer is OK for as long as the adult Samuel’s weak character is muffled by the aggressive racism of others; he’s uninteresting once Samuel is merely a hopeless drunk. Most of the actors concerned overdo white villainy in an obvious way. (There’s nothing like the psychological complexity of Michael Fassbender’s Edwin Epps in 12 Years a Slave.) Their mostly unlovely faces are continually twisted in hate. None of them dares to be casually nasty. Jackie Earle Haley is the best of them.
This is the first feature Nate Parker has made behind the camera (as well as his first feature-length screenplay). While it’s hard to complain, in view of historical reality, about the amount or the nature of the violence in the film, Parker contrives to make much of it garish. He’s also happy, whenever it suits, to create tableaux rather than simulate reality; and the climactic confrontation between the rebelling slaves and their white oppressors has an over-choreographed quality. The score by Henry Jackman is important-motion-picture boilerplate but there is a musical highlight: an excerpt from Nina Simone’s version of ‘Strange Fruit’, which Parker uses to accompany a display of hanging black corpses. The poetic power of Simone’s voice quite upstages the images on screen. The role of Christianity is one of the strongest elements in the story and the most dramatically ambiguous: the Word of the Lord, a means of subduing discontent among the slaves, is used eventually by Nat Turner as justification for the violent uprising. (This double-edged potential is made explicit in a sequence in which Nat and the disgusting Reverend Walthall, overplayed by Mark Boone Junior, engage in verbal conflict, trading verses from the Bible.) The Christian mythos is pushed too hard, however, when the film turns Nat into a virtual Christ figure – except that he awaits his execution with dry-eyed fortitude, without agony. One of the oddest aspects of The Birth of a Nation is the way that it mashes up the heroisms of political conviction, religious self-sacrifice and blaxpoitation cinema. It’s 1831 but, as the rebellion gathers momentum, Nat Turner tells one of his men, ‘We gotta keep focused, brother.’
12 December 2016
