The Birth of a Nation

THE BIRTH OF A NATION   ***

Nate Parker

2016

IDEA:  The story of Nat Turner, a preacher who led fellow slaves in an insurgency against their owners in 1831 Virginia.

BLURB:  Bristling with urgency and palpable moral outrage, The Birth of a Nation decocts American racial tensions in service of a cathartic cri de coeur for our uneasy times. More than a retelling of a historical event, the film is energized by the politics of the contemporary moment that inform its righteous anger. Nate Parker potently builds the cultural resonances into the picture, locating biblical and modern parallels in a story he fashions as both myth and future social promise. The portrayal of profoundly recusant slave Nat Turner could rightly be dinged for hagiography if not for the way he becomes filtered through his own homiletic teachings: while the Christ imagery is heavy-handed and often excessive, especially considering Parker has cast himself in the sanctified role, it is drawn from a place deeply connected to the guiding principles of his character and the culture he emboldens. Like the film’s title, it is also an emphatic reclamation of text that has and continues to be used to persecute and subjugate. Parker bluntly foregrounds this safeguard of religion to underscore its centrality and assert its primary purpose as one of enlightenment. He also calls upon other hallmarks of what would become the civil rights movement, giving particularly persuasive space to the rallying power of oration. The Birth of a Nation is not an especially refined film, and it shouldn’t have to be. Parker’s rough-edged, two-fisted approach bespeaks a visceral, untrammeled expression that in many ways disarms legitimate reservations about his film’s design. An emotional and political deflagration, it bursts forth as a splanchnic howl from the depths of an embattled African American psyche.