The Birth of a Nation (2016)
I didn’t know what “The Birth of a Nation” (2016) would be about. All of the knowledge I had about it was the movie poster.
Frankly, I kinda wish it had stayed that way.
The movie tells the true story of Nat Turner, a slave of the Turner cotton plantation in early-1800s Virginia. Nat (Nate Parker) teaches himself how to read as a small child, is noticed by the mistress of the plantation, and then formally taught for a while, until it’s decided he should go back to being a field-hand.
Nat’s reading education was based on the Bible, because that’s quite possibly the only book the South has ever had. This semi-formal education in scripture results in Nat working as a pastor for the other slavehands at the plantation, and is then farmed out (pun not intended) to other plantations with the intention of striking the fear of god into unruly slaves to keep them in line.
During his travels as a slave preacher, Nat sees a horrific range of slave abuses by the white owners and slavedrivers.
And you, the audience, get to see them too.
In horrifyingly graphic detail.
This movie has all of the violence and gore of a Tarantino film, with none of the dark humor or action sequences to balance it out. Even “Django Unchained” (2012), which included a freed slave murdering a bunch of white people in gory detail, managed to make it tolerable for the audience.
The more Nat travels, the worse things are.
So Nat holds a midnight meeting with a few other slaves and starts to plan a rebellion, but states that they must bide their time until they get a signal from God. This signal comes in the form of a total solar eclipse.
A quick google search says that there were no such eclipses in the time window of Nat’s life (1801-1830) in Virginia. Again: flexible reality.
Thus starts the rebellion.
That night (I think), Nat murders his owner, Samuel Turner (Armie Hammer). The finishing scene where Sam dies is framed with Nat on one side, Sam on the floor in a pool of his own blood, and a heretofore unseen stained-glass window with a giant red crucifix, back-lit by a moon with the most perfect sense of dramatic timing.
There is some thematic dissonance in this film: the Old Testament is very clearly okay with the concept of owning slaves, while the Ten Commandments explicitly say “Thou Shall Not Murder.” Even if your version of the Bible says “Thou Shall Not Kill,” which encompasses planned murder and more, it’s pretty obvious that you shouldn’t do it.
It’s odd that a character who so clearly chooses to work with the word of God decides to explicitly break one of 10 the rules every single Christian is supposed to follow.
“Are you sure he’s supposed to be a Christian preacher?” I can hear you asking.
Yes. I am.
At one point, Nat baptizes a white man, who has some incredibly flimsy reason for why he can’t get baptized by a white preacher.
The real-life result of Nat’s uprising is that 60 white people (slave owners, their family members, other white employees) were killed. Meanwhile, 120+ slaves were killed, many of them not part of the rebellion and just had the misfortune of being black in America at that time.
The movie included some very odd scenery.
At one point during the night of the uprising, Nat’s band of renegade slaves are faced with a small militia of white folk who find out what’s happening. Nat’s side has a few guns and a lot of people, while the white people all have guns but there aren’t many of them. The scene starts with gunfire and an almost-guaranteed failure for Nat’s party, then transitions to day and Nat is helping the remaining slaves stand up so they can continue on.
I’m not saying that they couldn’t have succeeded, just that the scene was set to make it look like they absolutely shouldn’t have.
There were also some weird “artistic” bits that were just weird. One scene showed a hand holding an ear of corn, leaves(?) and everything, and the corn starts to liquefy. I would like to say it was some kind of metaphor for Nat’s growing hatred of white people, which it easily could have been, except they just showed the corn spontaneously turn to goo then go back to the story with no change in timeline.
The opening scene of the movie is Nat as a child, running through the forest in preparation for some kind of African ritual. Got it.
The last scene before we watch Nat get hanged is child-Nat running again, only to find adult-Nat, coated in white paint with his arms stretched out. It was too on-the-nose.
The ending, watching Nat get hanged, was both contextually and historically fitting. Certainly not a happy ending.
All in all, This movie was uncomfortable to watch.
Not because of ‘white guilt’ or anything, but just because of the raw gore and lack of humanity that every character showed every other character.
I think part of the problem is that none of the murders feel cathartic.
Sure, you saw the slaves get abused by the white men, and those slaves then took it personally to murder them in return. I get that. But those deaths don’t feel fulfilling.
It’s not like watching Django kill Mr. Candy, where you as the audience member feel some schadenfreude at Mr. Candy’s demise. The targeted murders in this movie feel so empty, considering the emotional weight they’re supposed to carry.
I honestly can’t say I recommend it.
Graphically it was a beautiful film.
Tone and pacing and character development and plot... not so much.
Go watch anything else.
