The Birth of a Nation<\/em>, Nate Parker\u2019s searing life of Nat Turner, is a brilliant and iconic piece of Christian moviemaking\u2013right up until Turner\u2019s slave rebellion begins.<\/p>\n Birth<\/em> has attracted intense controversy in part because of rape charges against both Parker and his co-writer. I\u2019m not going to get into that, largely because you\u2019ll have your own beliefs on whether or how those charges should color your ticket-buying decisions, except to say that the portrayal of sexual violence in the film itself is complex. It\u2019s never presented in a dehumanizing or fetishistic way. And Turner\u2019s wife goes on a spiritual journey of her own which mirrors (maybe too closely) her husband\u2019s; she has some of the movie\u2019s most unexpected lines. The women in this movie are less fully-developed than the men, maybe treated too much as inspirational figures, but they are not reduced to support staff or muse.<\/p>\n Birth<\/em> is structured as a traditional childhood-to-death biopic. A birthmark on his chest sets the young Nat Turner apart, and in a vivid scene of the furtive survival of African traditional religion, he is told that he has a special purpose. He befriends a white boy, the son of the plantation owner, and a nice white slaveholding lady teaches him to read\u2013although she makes sure he only reads the Bible, nothing too subversive. Nat becomes a child preacher to the white folks. His church features a bizarre mix of Catholic iconography (the Sacred Heart of Jesus) and Protestant everything else; I think<\/em> this mixing of Christianities is deliberate, implying a universal complicity and serving as the white parallel of later images like a crucifix where Jesus has obviously African features. Although Nat is forced to return to picking cotton, he continues to preach to the slaves. And so when times get harder for the slaveholders of Virginia, they pay that nice white boy, all grown up now, to bring his black preacher to their plantations to preach to their slaves a gospel of obedience and submission.<\/p>\n The dehumanization and cruelty of American slavery hasn\u2019t been hidden from us in the earlier portions of the movie, but when Nat begins to travel to other plantations, he and the audience get a harrowing tour of the torture chambers of the antebellum. There are unforgettable images here, like the little white girl running with a little black girl on a leash, and careful choices about when to cut away from brutality and when to show it. The clothes alone serve to show the deliberate humiliation of the slave system, as the masters wear old and worn but normal clothes and the slaves wear coarse rags.<\/p>\n Parker\u2019s camera loves faces. Some reviewers criticized<\/a> the many close-ups, but to me it was an obvious attempt to portray individual human dignity. And a successful attempt: The camera honors these faces, seamed or agonized or serene, white and black alike, and reveals the characters\u2019 souls.<\/p>\n As a director and writer Parker makes a lot of choices that in less-competent hands would become sentimental. Some of them are<\/em> sentimental: The recurring vision of a black angel, for example, is too saccharine and not eerie enough to be sublime. There is a lot of extremely generic inspirational-movie-scene music. Basically all of the music that isn\u2019t African-inspired is terrible, and it nearly ruins the scene where Nat, after a brutal whipping, struggles to rise to his feet. But other scenes reach simplicity, not sentiment: the wedding-night scene with Nat and his wife in front of a twinned candle, or their courtship on a carpet of Southern blossoms, or a river baptism in which white humility and submission lead to hope, or Nat kneeling before his grandmother. There are lines that could still be said today (\u201cYou think you\u2019re smarter than me, don\u2019t you?\u201d \u201cThey\u2019re killing people everywhere for no reason but being black\u201d) but these parallels are never underlined; they\u2019re left for the audience to discern.<\/p>\n As the movie progresses, its exploration of Christian belief intensifies. Nat\u2019s Christianity is essential to the film and provides most of its turning points. The New Testament really does contain counsels of peace and obedience in the face of oppression\u2013but the slaveholders wanted the obedience without accepting that they were the oppressor. One of the movie\u2019s most unexpected qualities is the attention it gives to white souls as well as black; the black souls are the focus, as they should be in this story, but again and again we see how a slaveholding Christianity inevitably damages the souls of the slaveholders. Birth<\/em> explores, with empathy but without holding back, the myth of the nice white slaveholder. That little white boy who used to be Nat\u2019s friend is the clearest example. When he grows up he expresses his guilt, like generations of white Southerners after him, through alcoholism; it\u2019s a poor substitute for repentance and friendship, but it\u2019s one he can afford. And none of the white churchmen can help him, because their souls too have been made slaves to systematic sin.<\/p>\n A major turning point\u2013in which Nat obeys his increasingly-troubled conscience instead of his increasingly-degraded master\u2013comes when Nat baptizes a white man, an outcast. This baptism overturns the racial hierarchy and leads to a ferocious confrontation in which Nat and a dissolute white preacher trade Bible quotations. \u201cYou were bought for a price<\/a>,\u201d Nat challenges, in one of the movie\u2019s only explicit references to Jesus\u2019 death, \u201cso do not become slaves of men.\u201d<\/p>\n There comes a point, as we knew there would, when Nat is ready to lead the slaves in violence. Parker\u2019s performance has all the charisma this role needs. And yet here both the direction and the writing lose their individuality, and begin to dissolve into Hollywood revenge-fantasy. Here and there in the movie I\u2019d thought that Parker overused that steely blue tone that so many movies rely on nowadays; pretty much the entire climax of the movie is shot in this cold, familiar blue grimth. The writing loses its honesty: The wife\u2019s speech blessing Nat\u2019s rebellion is a mass of cliches. The rebels are never shown killing anyone but adult men*, even though in the historical rebellion, they did not spare women and children. There was one moment when the audience with whom I saw the movie was made to feel genuinely uncomfortable with the rebels\u2019 violence, but for the most part, the violence plays as morally-uncomplicated catharsis.<\/p>\n