The Birth of a Nation - Movie Review - Sundance 2016

For film historians, the audacity of Nate Parker's Nat Turner biopic begins with the title: The Birth of a Nation. It shares its name with D.W. Griffith's century-old ode to the creation of the Ku Klux Klan — which, like Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda, is too innovative for its time to completely ignore, at least from an academic point of view.

But Parker beats Griffith at his own game. His take on the largest slave rebellion on American soil, which Parker directed and wrote as well as starred in, may be a little choppy, but it's also a remarkable and important teaching tool.

The story begins in Southampton County, Virginia, where young Nat, a slave on the Turner plantation, is adored by his parents and grandparents, who believe he will grow to a special purpose. As far as these things go, the Turners are “good” slavers who refrain from doling out brutal punishment and even aid young Nat by teaching him to read.

The Mistress of the house offers Nat Bible lessons (no other books, she says; those are only for whites), and he grows to become a preacher. Nat's sermons gain attention, and soon his master Samuel Turner (Armie Hammer) is essentially pimping him out to other plantations, hoping that hearing the Word of God from a fellow slave will have a quieting effect.

But seeing the enormity of slavery — especially when it takes a more demonstratively brutal form on other plantations — begins to open Nat's eyes. It's increasingly difficult for him to reconcile the Gospels with the reality around him.

As calamities befall people close to him (his wife is raped and beaten by a group of slave catchers that harassed his father), Nat decides that armed insurrection is actually his true calling.

The Birth of a Nation's most effective moments come in sequences that show the total madness of the antebellum South. The auction scenes are nauseating; even so-called “nice” whites gifting human beings to one another is almost too shocking to contemplate.

Unfortunately, Parker's style is extremely conventional in much of the film's plotting. Too often, the dialogue is on the nose, and some dreamlike images don't seem underpinned by much else in the film.

When the violence finally comes, it happens abruptly. Turner's change from a preacher to guerrilla isn't very smooth, and the independent film's low budget doesn't do the action sequences any favors.

Still: Nat Turner is, for many, just a few paragraphs in a history book. He's an important figure who reflected sentiment prior to the Civil War, but also killed a lot of random white people. Who needs to think about whether he was a hero or a crazy person; let's turn the page.

The Birth of a Nation takes a deeper dive into a man too often relegated to footnote status. The film suggests that, no, there weren't any “good whites” so long as they were enjoying an economic advantage derived from exploiting slaves. Maybe the wives of the slavers didn't “ask” to be put there, but neither did the descendants of those stolen from Africa.

It's a thorny topic, and still a relevant one; no, America hasn't solved its “race issue.” Stories like these must be told, not buried — and while this movie isn't a masterpiece (it has little of the cinematic grace and emotional resonance of Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave, for example), it is absolutely one of 2016's must-see films.