The Birth of a Nation review: Nate Parker's powerful, disturbing historical piece hinges on bloodshed

Nate Parker, 120 mins, starring: Nate Parker, Armie Hammer, Aja Naomi King, Jackie Earle Haley, Penelope Ann Miller

Nate Parker’s The Birth Of A Nation shares a title with DW Griffith’s 1915 film, notorious for exalting white supremacism and The Ku Klux Klan. Parker comes at Nineteenth Century American history from the opposite perspective to that of Griffith. What makes his film so provocative and so troubling is its absolute refusal to provide its audience with a consolatory ending.

This is a movie that hinges on bloodshed and violence. For most of its running length, the black slaves are brutalised by the white slave owners. They’re beaten and raped. One has his front teeth hammered out when he goes on hunger strike (that makes it easier to force feed him). Then, when Nat Turner (played by Parker himself) leads the rebellion, the slaves themselves are just as cruel and implacable toward the whites, massacring them in their beds and decapitating them.

Nat is born into slavery. His father goes foraging by night for extra food for him. In an early scene that could have come out of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, he’s confronted by slave catchers, sadistic types with lanky hair and bad teeth who kill for pleasure. Little Nat (played as a child by Tony Espinosa) is watching from behind a tree. This is his initiation into the ways of the white folk.

Throughout the film, Parker contrasts the ugliness of the human behaviour with the majesty of the Virginia landscapes. Seen at dawn or twilight, the empty cotton fields look eerily beautiful. The forests are full of wildly luxuriant willow trees. Nat is a sensitive and gentle boy. Noticing that he can read, the kindly white matriarch Elizabeth Turner (Penelope Ann Miller) invites him into her home.

There’s an uncomfortable scene in which little Nat looks in longing at her library only to be told, "these books are for white folk, they are full of things your people wouldn’t understand." Instead, Nat is given a bible which he studies very intently.

Early on, Nat’s life doesn’t seem especially grim. He has a caring family. He gets to play with Elizabeth’s son Sam, growing up alongside him. When the “master” dies, his education comes to an abrupt halt and he’s sent back to pick cotton as a field hand. Even so, Sam (played as an adult by Armie Hammer), who takes over the farm, values him and treats him with relative respect.

At Nat’s encouragement, Sam buys a young female slave, Cherry (Aja Naomi King) at auction, saving her from white farmers who otherwise would have raped and probably killed her. Nat and Cherry fall in love. In spite of their circumstances, they achieve something approaching domestic contentment. All the time, though, there are intimations of the violence to come.

Parker includes a slow motion shot of a little white girl playing with a little black girl, pulling her by a rope that has been put around her neck. Meanwhile, when Nat or the other slaves venture even a few yards off the Turner farm, they are subject to extreme punishment. Inevitably, the soundtrack includes a rendition of 'Strange Fruit', the song about lynching - “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze.”

The Birth Of A Nation takes a very pessimistic view of human nature. Even relatively sympathetic characters like Sam Turner and his mother turn out to be inveterate racists. Parker suggests that, in extremis, they care more about money than they do about human decency. One of the most confusing aspects of the film is the transformation in Sam’s character.

Initially, he seems decent. If Nat is attacked by a neighbouring farmer’s dogs or threatened for picking an object off the ground and returning it to the white lady who had dropped it, Sam will intervene. However, when the drought comes and the cotton crop fails, he takes to drink and his behaviour changes entirely. Nat’s skills as a preacher are something that he can barter. Neighbouring farmers will pay to have Nat give sermons to their unruly and disobedient slaves. If a rich neighbour wants to sleep with the wife of one of Sam’s own slaves, Sam won’t stand in his way.

Parker’s screenplay doesn't satisfactorily explain the shift in Sam’s character. All of a sudden, when money is tight, a previously likeable character begins behaving like a monster. Nat undergoes his own transformation. At first, his study of the bible teaches him tolerance and forgiveness. Then, when he witnesses more and more suffering, he begins to interpret the text in a very different way.

Instead of the "God of Love", his attention becomes focused on the "God of wrath". All of a sudden, the hero of the film, hitherto played in a nuanced and sympathetic fashion by Parker, turns into a vengeful killer. His goal is to "utterly destroy all they (the white slave owners) have."

The slave rebellion is bound to fail. Nat Turner and his followers are up against vastly superior and better-armed forces. On one level, Nat’s actions are completely suicidal. Parker has argued that Nat was protesting in the only way he could. The slave owners weren’t going to debate with him or give him a political platform. He therefore had to resort to the "sword and the axe".

Parker doesn’t gild the story at all or attempt to portray Nat as some Robin Hood-like folk hero. When he starts the rebellion, all he wants to do is kill. If his victims are in their beds, are unarmed or are children, that doesn’t make the slightest difference to him. It is just retribution. The slave owning families are being given a taste of the violence they themselves have meted out for so long.

In Hollywood movies about even the grimmest subjects, there is usually some symbolic final reel reconciliation. Here, all Parker provides is a very fleeting reference to the Civil War that will start in a few years’ time and during which the Union soldiers will complete the work that Nat Turner and his slave rebellion began.

That’s what makes The Birth Of A Nation both so powerful and so disturbing. The argument here, one that audiences may find very hard to swallow, is that it takes violence to end violence.