The Birth of The Birth of a Nation

Deconstructing Nate Parker’s controversial film with help from D.W. Griffith and Chris Rock.

In an awful year, somehow a single movie has found itself in the middle of every horrible thing about America: racist violence, rape culture and whatever white Southerners are pissed off about.

On the one hand, Nate Parker's The Birth of a Nation is a perfectly competent prestige picture. It tells the painful story of Nat Turner, a literate, enslaved field hand and preacher who led an 1831 Virginia slave rebellion that inspired a massive, murderous reaction against free and enslaved black Americans throughout the South.

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The film's incredible success at the Sundance Film Festival—Fox Searchlight purchased it for a festival-record $17.5 million—was bookended by grandiloquent statements about his film's historical import, in a time when America is finally again coming to terms with the violence committed against black Americans by police. Parker told the Huffington Post, "I honestly think this is a film that could start a conversation that can promote healing and systemic change in our country."

Then the rape charges surfaced.

Parker and Nation co-writer Jean McGianni Celestin had faced sexual assault charges while students at Penn State in 1999, which bleakly culminated in the 2012 suicide of their accuser. The film itself began receiving mixed reviews, with Vinson Cunningham of The New Yorker recently writing that "it's hard even to call it a successful attempt at propaganda."

In essence, The Birth of a Nation has been a total shitshow.

The film is often aesthetically beautiful: Gorgeous, sweeping shots of the rural South underpin the day-to-day toil of farm work, and Turner's brief dream sequences are haunting. Parker wields depictions of graphic violence sparsely, only using them when necessary to drive home the cruelty waiting around every corner.

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But Nation is heavy-handed, pounding in Christian symbolism to drive home Turner as a messiah figure. The first half of the film stumbles through syrupy portrayals of interpersonal relationships—one particular double take of Turner seeing his wife, Nancy (Aja Naomi King), at church will roll your eyes out of your skull.

Nation is a big, difficult, still important mess, a Kobayashi Maru of American history. Here are three movies that shine a light on it.

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation is one of the greatest technical achievements in cinematic history. It's also one of the most racist films ever made. It follows the story of a Northern family and a Southern family in the Reconstruction-era South that unite to drive black soldiers—cruelly portrayed as lascivious, violent and lazy by white actors in blackface—out of a South Carolina town with the help of the film's gallant heroes, the Ku Klux Klan.

Part of Parker's goal with Nation was to reclaim the poisonous legacy of Griffith's film. Those conspicuous Christian symbols in Nation are taken from Griffith's use of Christianity to justify the KKK's racial terrorism.

Boyz n the Hood (1991)

One of Nation's recurring themes is the everyday, dehumanizing terror that the institution of slavery was to its victims, no matter how "peaceful" it could seem in relative quiet. A marriage is violated when a drunken guest of Turner's master, Sam Turner (Armie Hammer), wants to have sex with his slave Esther (Gabrielle Union). A minor act of goodwill suddenly turns into a violent humiliation. A force-feeding is one of the most grotesque scenes you will see on film.

This puts Nation solidly in the tradition of movies like John Singleton's Boyz n the Hood, which follows Tre Styles (Cuba Gooding Jr.) in the Crenshaw District in Los Angeles, chronicling life growing up in a neighborhood plagued by the constant threat of violence, where a talented young man who does everything right can still end up bloody in the street. Nation best succeeds as this kind of film, a reflection of the chaos and terror in which systemic racism keeps good people trapped.

Top Five (2014)

In Top Five, Chris Rock's character Andre Allen is a comedian in existential crisis, trying to make his comeback after a disastrous foray into "serious" film when his movie Uprize, a story about Haitian revolutionary Dutty Boukman, is viciously panned.

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Nation's worst moments reflect a director out of his element tackling a monumentally serious story. In the film's corniest sequence, Turner and his rebels shout out, one by one, the chores they no longer have to do now that their former masters are dead. It is impossible not to mentally insert a phantom Chris Rock in period garb springing to the forefront.

By the end of Nation, you'll have a creeping suspicion this could be a take on Mel Gibson's Braveheart (1995) set in the antebellum American South. And it is very hard to treat Braveheart as a film that revolutionized anything.

Critics Rating: B The Birth of a Nation is rated R. It opens October 7 at Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Eastport, Fox Tower, Lloyd, Tigard and Vancouver.

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