When I was in high school, way back in the mid-90s, I worked at a movie theater, sweeping floors and taking tickets. It was a good job, but the theater life hardens you. Whenever Mel Gibson’s Braveheart let out, most of the patrons exited the theater crying. We laughed at them just like when my co-workers laughed at me when I staggered out of Schindler’s List in tears. However, there was something about Braveheart, the story of how William Wallace rallied his Scottish brethren to fight back against the British soldiers who subjugated them, that struck a nerve. It even earned Gibson a Best Picture Oscar. The combination of an uprising with a tragic, martyr-making ending always caught people off-guard, touched emotions. Despite Gibson’s tarnished legacy, many still recall the film fondly, even if it does display the director’s homophobic tendencies.
It is the same mix of awe and distaste that I experienced when watching Nate Parker’s – another director fighting personal demons – controversial The Birth of a Nation. Much like William Wallace, Nat Turner was a subjugated man pushed to his limits. A slave turned preacher, Turner led a revolt in 1831 that precipitated the Civil War. A labor of love for the director-star-writer, The Birth of a Nation takes its name from the 1915 D.W Griffith film in an act of similar rebellion. Long-admired for its technical greatness, Griffith’s film tells the story of the Ku Klux Klan, sympathetically. By pinching this moniker, Parker is replacing Griffith’s racist monolith with what could be his magnum opus. At least, that is what it feels like in every single scene, no matter how subtle or overwrought.
The Birth of a Nation opens with its protagonist as a child, setting him up with an almost superhuman mythology, just like Braveheart did for Wallace. Here, Nat Turner’s mother brings him to a secret slave ceremony in the woods. An old man looks at the young Turner and decrees, based on a series of birthmarks on his sternum, that he will be a leader. As Turner grows, he learns to read, and after being given a Bible by a white woman, he begins to preach. Life may be easier for Turner (relatively speaking) than his friends and family who are subjugated to the awful violence that fills the lives of those enslaved. Parker takes his time before we get to the revolt, chronicling with searing detail the horrors that befall Turner and the people he loves.
The best moments of The Birth of a Nation are early in the film as Turner comes into his own. Parker gives a restrained, yet powerful performance as a man who deserves better than the hand he was dealt. His owner, Samuel Turner (Armie Hammer), is mostly kind, especially compared to the other white landowners nearby, but soon the relationship sours. It would be easy to dismiss The Birth of a Nation as pompous, especially in its most gory and heavy-handed moments. However, Parker’s passion for the project keeps the ship upright, even when the film veers towards grandiloquence.
If there is a flaw in The Birth of a Nation, it’s that Parker often opted for bombast over subtlety. One big moment follows another, especially as the film careens towards the slaves’ bloody revolt. There is a brutal scene midway where Turner is whipped. The sound of the blows should be enough. We don’t need the soaring music. It feels too manipulative. Even if the film comes at a time when African-Americans are still being brutalized by white people in power, Parker would have done himself a service by holding back some. However, these lives matter, and, like the sad end of William Wallace, the final moments of The Birth of a Nation should send folks to their cars in tears. Hopefully, the ushers won’t be laughing this time.
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