Fox Searchlight
It’s difficult to review a film that comes with as much baggage as The Birth of a Nation does, but we are here to discuss the merits of the film and not the character of the star, writer and director Nate Parker. You can find plenty of discussion about his past elsewhere and decide for yourself where he fits on a scale from Roman Polanski to Woody Allen.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s focus on the film which tells the historical story of Nat Turner, a child born into slavery in the Deep South who grew into a man who had convinced himself — if not others — that he was a prophet of the Lord. As a child, Nat was allowed to play with the child of the plantation owner but he was not allowed inside the house. When the mistress of the house (Penelope Ann Miller) learned Nat had the gift of reading, she took the child into her home to teach him, mainly schooling him on the Bible.
As Nat (Nate Parker) matured, he felt a calling to the Lord and held church services for the other slaves on Sundays, and slaves from neighboring plantations also attended. Learning of this gift, the local minister set up a business deal with Nat’s owner, Samuel Turner (Armie Hammer), to bring Nat to various plantations in the area to preach the Gospel … and teach the slaves how they should behave, in essence using the word of God (which actually instructs slave owners how to beat their slaves!) to control a potentially unruly group of people.
While Nat and Thomas had a somewhat cordial relationship, several events caused Nat to rebel, eventually organizing the slaves in the general vicinity to kill their masters and march to the fort in Jerusalem, VA, where they could steal weapons and really make their cause known. But things don’t always work out as planned.
Nate Parker has assembled a very talented cast to assay roles that unfortunately become a bit stereotypical, from the slave hunters to the house slaves. Parker himself does a fine job as Turner, but the film itself is problematic, least of all because people will see this film as an accurate account of Nat Turner’s Uprising as it came to be known. Unfortunately, it does more to mythologize and romanticize Turner and avoids many of the harsh realities of what happened during and after the uprising. In one scene, after the plantation owners have been murdered, one of the slaves is seen helping take a child away. It comes off as a tender moment of mercy, but in reality no one was spared, not even the children.
The film is full of clichéd shots seen in films about the pre-Civil War South since Gone With the Wind: trees full of Spanish moss, beautiful grand plantation homes, sweeping vistas of cotton fields. Everything looks beautiful but this is all a facade to make the film feel more “important” than it really is. The final shot even tries to tie the uprising to the Civil War, but it seems unlikely that it had that much impact as the two events were about 30 years apart. And historically, the revolt led to the murders of hundreds of slaves and free blacks by the whites who were terrified of another thing happening. But you don’t get any of this from the film which really just leaves you wondering at the end why many regard Turner as a hero when it seems he accomplished nothing, leaving the viewer oddly unemotional by the time the credits roll. Some may be moved, some may certainly feel a twinge of “white guilt” but outside of the cast, the music and the gorgeous cinematography, by the end of the movie you may ask yourself what was the point?
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