The Birth of a Nation, film review: Don’t fall for Saint Nate

This mangled account of a brutal event in US history serves only to glorify its maker and star rather than reveal any truths, says David Sexton
David Sexton9 December 2016

A strange and troubled history, it has, this film about the first great black slave revolt in America, led by Nat Turner, in Virginia in 1831.

Back in January, it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah to a massive standing ovation — before it had even started. Against the backdrop of #OscarsSoWhite and Black Lives Matter, this punky reclaiming of the title of DW Griffiths’s 1915 racist epic was a triumph even before it had been seen. After all, it had not only been written, directed, and produced by 36-year-old actor Nate Parker, it also starred him, an extraordinary achievement in itself.

After glowing reviews, the film, made on a budget of $8.5 million, was bought by Fox Searchlight for $17.5 million and seemed a cert for the awards season, just now getting into gear.

However, all that momentum was derailed in the summer when it emerged that Parker and his friend, the co-writer of this film, Jean McGianni Celestin, had, while athletics stars at Penn State, been accused of raping an 18-year-old female freshman in 1999. Both men said the encounter was consensual: Parker, who had had sex with the woman previously, was acquitted. Celestin was initially convicted but the conviction was overturned on appeal in 2005, when the alleged victim declined to testify again. In 2012 she committed suicide, her death certificate citing “PTSD due to physical and sexual abuse”.

Parker’s public reaction this summer to the emergence of this ugly story was grotesque. He told 60 Minutes he did not feel guilty and would not apologise to the girl’s family. He told Ebony magazine that, although he was wiser now, at 19 a threesome, getting a girl to be a dog, a player, is normal and fun. “Consent is all about — for me, back then — if you can get a girl to say yes, you win.” The girl’s sister, Sharon Loeffler, wrote a painful article for Variety, saying Parker had caused torment to her sister and was now sickeningly exploiting her all over again.

Works of art may not be invalidated by their creator’s biography (the composer Carlo Gesualdo murdered his wife and her lover: his madrigals remain remarkable). However, The Birth of a Nation cannot be separated from its writers’ troubles. For its plot pivots on the rapes of two black women (not known to be part of the historical story), ostentatiously focusing not on the women themselves (one never even speaks) but on the outraged revolt of their husbands, that is to say, on what the rapes mean primarily to them.

When the lead reviewers of the trade papers, who had welcomed the film at the festival, saw it again in the autumn on US release, they largely recanted their praise, while other weighty writers judged it “a seriously damaged and inadequate movie” (Richard Brody, The New Yorker). The Birth of a Nation bombed at the box office in the States and it is unlikely to figure as an Oscar-contender after all (look for La La Land, Moonlight, Arrival, Fences, Nocturnal Animals, Silence, Manchester by the Sea).

So that’s one background, but also foreground, problem about this film (boldly ignored in its production notes) that you need to know about. Another, even before evaluating its qualities as film-making, is its relation to the historical record.

Most of the film is posturing: faces of noble suffering looking into the middle distance

In August 1831, Nat Turner, 30, a Bible-inspired, self-appointed prophet, led the first-ever revolt of enslaved and freed African-Americans, killing 60 or so white people, not sparing women or children, in Southampton County, Virginia.

The rebellion was suppressed within two days and those involved swiftly arrested and tried, some 56 being executed, while white mobs killed more than 200 other black people. Turner hid in a hole for two months before being discovered, tried and hanged himself.

There is one main source for the story, The Confessions of Nat Turner, as fully and voluntarily made to Thomas R Gray, published in 1831 (consultable online), fully acknowledged by Turner in court, this being confirmed under seal by six judges. It is an astonishing document, its very peculiarity confirmation of its authenticity.

Surprisingly, Nat says little about race or slavery, even volunteering that at the time of the revolt he had a kind master, Joseph Travis (written out of the film): “In fact, I had no cause to complain of his treatment of me.”

Instead, Nat complacently expounds his career as a religious visionary from a small boy, “with this confidence in my superior judgement”. He proclaims his deranged supernatural visions, being spoken to by the Spirit, who told him “the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent”, this murder spree eventually being prompted by an eclipse of the sun.

He was, his amanuensis Gray concluded, “a complete fanatic” and the blood curdled in his veins to look on him. Nat freely admits, for example, murdering a family of five in their sleep with his band, casually adding: “There was a little infant sleeping in a cradle, that was forgotten, until we had left the house and gone some distance, when Henry and Will returned and killed it.”

This is not the film Nate Parker has made, which is a crude hagiography, a sanctification of his own character. To a conventional biopic he has, for example, added scenes in which Nat is hired out by his owner Samuel Turner, originally nice enough but now a desperate alcoholic (Armie Hammer), to preach obedience to slaves on other plantations, thus giving him a regional tour of the very cruellest conditions of slavery then prevailing, to fire him up.

Ego trip: director, writer and producer Nate Parker as slave Nat Turner
Alamy

Although initially Nat quotes the First Epistle of Peter to the poor wretches, commending submission to masters even when they are harsh, he soon moves on to the Psalms, demanding the singing of a new song. Then, after the outrageous rapes of his wife by a band of roving slave-catchers, and the wife of his chief ally, by a racist house guest, followed by his own crucifixion-styled whipping for having had the insolence to baptise a white man, he calls for full insurrection from his little group of followers: “Now go and smite Amalek” (a somewhat obscure enemy of the Israelites).

And off the revolutionaries go, rejoicing that today they are free men, fighting bravely Braveheart-style (Mel Gibson advised, in fact). Whereas in real life the revolt petered out, here it ends in glorious self-sacrifice in a great fight in the town of Jerusalem — and instead of hiding in a hole for weeks only to be discovered by a dog, Nat heroically offers himself up for martyrdom to stop the killing of “people everywhere for no reason but being black”.

Seeing the film for the first time, I thought it well enough acted, shot and edited, albeit at the level of a good TV drama rather than that of Steve McQueen’s masterpiece, 12 Years a Slave. Second time around, it seemed barely a film at all but a pageant.

Although there are some scenes of real dramatic tension (the eruption of a sadistic slave-catcher into Nat’s family home when he is a boy, Nat’s confrontation with the slaves to whom he must preach obedience), most of the film (made in just 27 days in Savannah, Georgia) is posturing: faces of noble suffering looking into the middle distance, rather than relating directly to one another.

The symbolic imagery is often shockingly crude. Nat watches his wretched master, whom he has just fatally axed, expire right under a stained glass window of Christ blessing the act. After posing gloriously backlit against the prison bars, at his hanging, Nat looks up into the sky and a gorgeous black angel hovers there for him, literally, luminously backlit too. Throughout the music by Henry Jackman is coarsely enforcing, all choral oohing and aahing (plus the swaggering selection of Nina Simone’s rendition of Strange Fruit over what is more or less an illustration of the meaning of that great song).

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As a boy, in the extended prologue, Nat is played with spirited intensity by Tony Espinosa. Thereafter he is played, basically as a great saviour, if not actually Christ indeed, by Nate Parker himself, an extraordinary self-aggrandisement that goes some way to explain his otherwise barely credible statements this year.

The film ends by stating how Nat’s body was trashed, “all in the hope of preventing a legacy”. But this film does not truly examine the legacy of slavery, that monstrosity in American history, so much as glorify, first, its hero and, then, killing, if not terrorism. (Nate Parker fatuously says in the production notes: “We have to remember the only weaponry he could access was the sword and the axe. Perhaps if Nat had lived in the age of Twitter, he wouldn’t have had to resort to violence... I mean if Nat Turner had Facebook, it could have been a different kind of revolution.”)

And, really beyond belief, Nate Parker also says: “When I see Nat Turner in the final moments of the film, it moves me to tears every time... He is so heroic.” That is: when he sees himself, in his own film. You don’t have to admire it.

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