Film review

  • The Birth of a Nation (2016)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

     

  • Sully:  Miracle on the Hudson

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Clint Eastwood (2016)

    On 15 January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 took off from LaGuardia Airport en route for Charlotte, North Carolina.  Three minutes into the flight, both engines of the plane – an Airbus A320 – were disabled, the result of a collision with a flock of Canada geese.   The chief pilot, Captain Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger, judged that he lacked the engine power either to return to LaGuardia or to make a landing at nearby Teterboro Airport in New Jersey.   Sully therefore decided to try to land the plane on the Hudson River.  With the help of New York City emergency services, the plane’s crew was able to evacuate all on board without loss of life or serious injury.   After nearly thirty years as a commercial pilot with US Airways and a few days short of his fifty-eighth birthday, Chesley Sullenberger III instantly became a press and public hero.

    One good thing about Sully: Miracle on the Hudson is that it may help me remember Sully’s real name when it comes up in a general knowledge quiz, instead of mumbling, ‘It’s something like Wesley Cheeseburger’.  Clint Eastwood’s film is essentially a tribute to the heroism and altruism of Sully, his co-pilot Jeffrey Skiles and the NYC emergency services.  Eastwood and his screenwriter, Todd Komarnicki, are well aware that this benign intention does not a feature-length drama make, even with the help of the almost unavoidably exciting water landing.  They therefore devote a good deal of screen time to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)’s investigation into what happened and, in particular, whether Sully could have landed without undue risk at LaGuardia or Teterboro.  This inquiry isn’t an invention but the NTSB has criticised the film’s misrepresentation of its investigators.  The director and the star, Tom Hanks (who plays Sully), have made rather different comments on this aspect of the story, according to an Associated Press article of September 2016[1]:

    “Until I read the script, I didn’t know the investigative board was trying to paint the picture that he [Sullenberger] had done the wrong thing. They were kind of railroading him into ‘it was his fault,'” Eastwood said in a publicity video for the Warner Bros. film.

    Hanks told The Associated Press in an interview that a draft script included the names of real-life NTSB officials, but Sullenberger — who is an adviser on the film — requested they be taken out.

    “He said, ‘These are people who are not prosecutors. They are doing a very important job, and if, for editorial purposes, we want to make it more of a prosecutorial process, it ain’t fair to them,'” said Hanks. “That’s an easy thing to change.”

    The controversy it’s caused does little to disguise the blandness of Sully (the controversy may not have harmed its box-office takings, however  – already nearly four times the $60m budget).  As is customary in transport dramas, we’re briefly introduced to a selection of the passengers before they board.  The fact that everyone got out of this plane alive makes that easier to take than usual.  (At the end of the film, some of the real passengers on US Airways Flight 1549 appear on screen, identifying themselves by their seat numbers.)  It’s possible that the recentness of Flight (2012) influenced the structure of Sully:  even though Robert Zemeckis’s movie was fictional, Clint Eastwood may have felt the overlap of subject matter and dramatic highlights in the two stories was enough to warrant juggling the order of main events.  Whatever his reasons, Eastwood gets into the NTSB inquiry too soon and to counterproductive effect.  The reconstruction of the flight itself is highly competent action movie-making (the editing is by Blu Murray) but, by the time it arrives (halfway through the film), it’s shadowed by the investigation and what we already know are the key issues being examined by the NTSB.  Nor is the reconstruction particularly revealing of what actually went on in the cockpit.  We’re never in any doubt that Sully’s actions were well meant, that he believed his decision was the only right decision in the circumstances.

    The film begins with a plane crashing into New York skyscrapers.  This turns out to be Sully’s nightmare of what could have happened although the images inevitably evoke 9/11 in the viewer’s mind.  Later on, there are a couple of flashbacks to seminal moments from earlier in the protagonist’s flying career and we learn that Sully combines his job as a commercial pilot with work as an expert adviser on flight safety to various bodies.   All these things feel perfunctory and extraneous to the central NTSB investigation, with which Clint Eastwood is so preoccupied that he doesn’t make clear when it’s taking place.  There are phone conversations between Sully and his wife (Laura Linney) in the immediate aftermath of the Hudson landing, as well as after rumours emerging from the NTSB investigation are threatening to sully Sully’s heroism.  Since we never see the couple together, it’s almost as if he wasn’t allowed home until he’d cleared his name.  (The NTSB published its report some sixteen months after the incident occurred.)

    The playing as well as the writing of the NTSB panellists is obvious:  Mike O’Malley, Anna Gunn and, to a lesser extent, Jamey Sheridan exude, from the word go, censorious appetite – they have the look of people whose sole function in the story is to be made to eat crow in due course.  The supposed climax to the film is the public hearing, at which the panel’s rulebook small-mindedness is already struggling against the arguments made by Sully and Skiles (Aaron Eckhart).  The computer simulations run for the NTSB, which at first suggest there was time to return to LaGuardia, tell a different story when the intelligent human factor is taken into account.  (In other words, Sully could have had time only if he’d reacted automatically rather than as the result of swift but considered decision-making.)  Then a crucial piece of evidence arrives on cue:  analysis of one of the Airbus’s engines, now recovered from the Hudson, confirms that, as Sully insisted, the engine had been entirely disabled by the bird strike.  When the pilots are vindicated, Anna Gunn’s character turns suddenly smiley and sympathetic.  It’s hard to tell whether this is meant to reflect despicable swimming with the tide or to prove she’s a-nice-person-really.

    The consummate professional Sully is played by an actor to match:  Tom Hanks, not for the first time, skilfully deflates speeches that, in the wrong acting hands and mouth, could sound hopelessly pompous.  Hanks doesn’t show too much variety, though:  Sully looks like a man something’s eating at even before the fateful take-off from LaGuardia (there are no clues to what that something might be).   Hanks’s reaction to the news that all passengers and crew have been safely evacuated is wonderful and affecting but having him play a humane, modest but quietly determined hero is very predictable.  He was much more interesting playing a personally less sympathetic captain in Paul Greengrass’s Captain Phillips.  Aaron Eckhart gives good support although you sense that he’s straining at the leash to be able to do more than the writing of the role of Jeff Skiles allows.  As Mrs Sully, Laura Linney manages to inject an amazing degree of real feeling into the few and standard lines she’s required to deliver.

    7 December 2016

    [1] http://tinyurl.com/hh29lu7

     

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