As with its notorious, KKK-celebrating 1915 namesake, the history of Nate Parker’s The Birth Of A Nation is almost more interesting than the movie itself. Written and directed by Parker, and starring him as the 1831 slave-rebellion leader Nat Turner, it was feted at Sundance, and subject of an intense bidding-war. A movie many felt was needed in the post-Ferguson Black Lives Matter cultural moment, it was consequently overrated by a hungry audience, reflecting the hopes and desires of the viewer more than the real qualities of the movie.
On the eve of its release, however, with high expectations for its profitability, the details of a long-forgotten rape case against Parker re-emerged. He had been acquitted, but the accuser took her own life many years later. It was ugly. And there in the movie was a critical moment based on a rape that had been invented for dramatic purposes. This time round, the movie was underrated and scorned for completely different reasons, and on release it was considered a box office bomb. Parker went from hero to villain in less than nine months.
Artists take on Nat Turner and his rebellion at their peril. Sophie’s Choice author William Styron found himself pilloried by black intellectuals for his bestselling 1967 novel The Confessions Of Nat Turner; the white author was accused of rejecting historical evidence and trespassing on aspects of the African-American experience. And Turner’s story is strong stuff, not uplifting at all, and so incendiary that it’s rarely taught in schools. Turner and his band killed around 60 white people – mainly with hatchets and hammers – before being annihilated themselves, amid maximum bloodshed.
Parker’s Turner is a saintly figure driven to his limits by murders, rapes, whippings and omnipresent cruelty. When his childhood companion, assuringly played by Armie Hammer, inherits Nat from his father, he learns that lifelong friendship cannot survive one man’s ownership of another.
Away from the controversies surrounding it, The Birth Of A Nation is an often impressive rendering, resting on solid performances and painterly cinematography, if a little plodding and prone to kitschy adornments (Strange Fruit plays over hanging corpses; there’s a duff moment with an angel). But in the final moments the screaming, vengeful, twisted white faces that rain down blows on the captive Turner en route to the scaffold speak almost directly to the vile historical moment we now find ourselves in. I wasn’t completely convinced by the movie, but that moment chilled my blood.
The Birth Of A Nation is in cinemas from Friday 9 December
