It’s astonishing that the story of Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion against the slave-holding whites of Virginia has never before been given the narrative feature treatment. Turner, a literate slave and Baptist preacher, is the sort of galvanic revolutionary that Hollywood normally adores lionizing. Yet here it is, 2016, and actor-turned-director Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation is evidently the first cinematic dramatization of Turner’s tale.
Knowingly named for D.W. Griffith’s notoriously racist 1915 epic, the film portrays the vivid path of Turner’s life, first as a wide-eyed prodigy (Tony Espinosa), and later as a traveling minister, shuttled around the county by his master (Armie Hammer) to quell agitated slaves. Director Parker judiciously depicts the adult Turner as both typical in terms of his enslaved experience and exceptional in his talent for study and oratory. The film is less concerned with the rebellion proper than in capturing the process by which Turner concluded that breaking his bonds through bloodshed was a moral act.
Parker’s direction is stunningly self-assured for a first-time filmmaker, and while his style is mostly classical and straightforward, he finds ways to work cinematically invigorating moments into an otherwise one-dimensional story arc. His closest artistic cousin might be Mel Gibson, in that both filmmakers favor dramas characterized by stark moral contrasts and righteous suffering. The Birth of a Nation is haunted to some extent by the uprising’s ultimate failure and its elicitation of a merciless retribution. (In this, the film echoes the recent Anthropoid.) Parker, however, forcefully highlights the through-line from wildfire rebellions like Turner’s to the eruption of Civil War and the way that the contradictions within antebellum Evangelicalism—like that between “the blessings of liberty” and a three-fifths compromise—were destined to ignite.
The Birth of a Nation opens in wide release Friday, October 7.
