When Nate Parker's passion project gained awards and rapturous applause at the Sundance Film Festival, it thrust him into a spotlight which has not been entirely beneficial to the film itself. While an artist should be separable from their art, there is a reason why Parker's past actions are mentioned so often in reviews of the film, as he's taken the writer-director-star role, and the content of the film sometimes makes the rape charges hard to ignore. If The Birth of a Nation were a great film, it might have been able to rise above these issues, and while it's well-shot and acted, Parker's severe limitations as a first-time director are consistently apparent, and his conventional, hagiographic script struggles to truly dig deep into its subject matter. There are surface pleasures here, but whether they're enough to satisfy will likely vary wildly.
Nat Turner (Nate Parker) is a literate slave who is put to work as a preacher on his plantation. Over the course of his life, he falls in love, gets married, and is made to preach for numerous other plantations, fetching his owner a fair bit of money and prestige while showing Nat the horrors of slavery.
While Nat Turner is most well-known for leading a failed slave rebellion, Parker's film approaches him through the lens of a straightforward great-man biopic. Although the film eventually starts showing (relatively shallow) depictions of the horrors of slavery, the bulk of it is focused on Turner himself, including listless scenes of him as a child and a totally hackneyed look at how he came to meet his wife. Parker struggles to find a fresh angle regarding the injustices of slavery, and especially when compared to 2013's acclaimed 12 Years a Slave, its take on the subject comes across as shallow.
However, images of these injustices are still powerful on their own, and even if the film isn't especially thorough in its condemnation of the slave system, simply depicting some of the brutalities committed under slavery is effective. The Birth of a Nation also succeeds in more subtle demonstrations of racism, such as white people inherently expecting the worst of any black person they encounter even slightly out of bounds, and the language - i.e. "boy" - used to reinforce the power dynamics of slavery. Unfortunately, on a few occasions, Parker brings up the topic of sexual assault, and here he struggles to get out of his own way. We don't hear the victims speak much for themselves, and as questionable as it is to introduce these characters mainly for the protagonist to react to them, it becomes even more uncomfortable when it's Nate Parker's face doing the reacting.
This is the most significant instance where Parker's ego gets him into trouble, but this self-aggrandizing is a consistent subtext throughout the entire film. Nat Turner's preaching is a conduit for subtle religious themes, and the film is very interested into turning him into a messiah figure. Parker is clearly very interested in making Turner out to be a martyr, and at the one point where Turner is whipped at the post, he even spreads his arms out as if he's being crucified. This is the sort of biopic which explores its subject entirely on a surface level: at best, Turner is an observer, and at worst, he's a symbol. Very rarely, if ever, is he a flawed human being, and while the film doesn't seem interested in being a character study, its brand of mythologizing comes across as egotistical and not terribly compelling.
However, those same religious themes do provide what depth the film is able to muster up, and citing verses in favour of slave liberation provides a distinctly faith-based version of anti-racism which I really wish the film explored more. Scripture is seen as the basis for liberation, and in an era where faith-based films often preach messages of intolerance, having such a socially conscious message based in Christianity is legitimately refreshing. However, the religious element also led to me wondering if the inevitable revolt would be moral by Christian standards, and unfortunately this undercuts the satisfaction of watching the oppressed take vengeance on their oppressors. As much as Turner makes a good case for God being in favour of liberation, the way Parker directs the scene calls attention to horrific bloodshed often enough to lend credence to the interpretation of the revolt as a sinful act, and one bit of dialogue which foreshadows the failure of the revolt further calls the righteousness of the revolt into question.
Mostly, though, the film seems to want us to take a mixture of inspiration and tragedy from the event, which is made very clear through the film's blunt, obvious score. The climax begins feeling like a horror movie, shot to emphasize the terror which the white plantation owners must be feeling, but eventually evolves to evoke a blandly confusing mixture of triumph and tragedy, clearly taking its cues from war films of the past. Parker's direction is one of the biggest issues with the film, as he rarely finds a particularly fresh or compelling way to frame the onscreen action. There are a fair number of very pretty shots, but Parker often struggles to use the medium to underscore the action, and many scenes are built from a quick, TV-like sequence of close-ups.
On top of the blunt score, the film's few licensed musical cues are hackishly obvious ("Strange Fruit" over the rebels hanging? Really?), and Parker's attempts at visual symbolism aren't a whole lot better. However, as unsubtle as The Birth of a Nation is, these devices are still ultimately effective in getting the point across, even if they sometimes veer into unintentional comedy. This might be part of why I still found the film to be watchable, as even in spite of the trite narrative and the flat direction, the film did manage to hold my attention.
More of this is probably down to the performances, however. Aside from Parker's own performance, few of the actors come across as especially directed, but almost all do their job fairly well, and aside from an early child actor, each performance is at least somewhat compelling. Parker's own performance is excellent, entrenching nuance and subtle emotion into Turner. A less capable lead would have made the shallowness of this portrayal a fair bit more evident, but although Parker casting himself as a martyr reeks of ego, it also does a lot to strengthen the film around him.
Like many other generic award-seeking biopics, The Birth of a Nation is totally watchable, although in this case, that's only as long as you can separate the art from the artist. Parker is far from a great director, and although it's clear that this is a passion project, his deficiencies as a filmmaker are worsened by his adherence to formula and the faint impression of egotism which the film gives off. Once, this seemed like a surefire awards contender, but in the face of its numerous inadequacies and its problematic nature, it would not be surprising if its momentum stops here. Whether you see it or not is up to you, and some of its images benefit from being displayed on the big screen, but this is hardly a great film, and any further awards traction it gains will be the result of being the right film at the right time.
6/10
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