And yet, even as I type all of that, I shake my head. I think about the rest of the film – the low-budget quality, the thudding script, the comic relief, the cardboard characters, the pulled punches – and I do not want to see that rape scene. I do not want to see the rape scene the just-woke-enough Nate Parker has to offer. I wouldn’t actually want to see it even if he hadn’t done what he did in college, and seeing the film around that missing scene only exacerbates that dread. It’s clear that he not only doesn’t understand rape culture, but he doesn’t understand how to make a Nat Turner film. I am ultimately left being glad the scene isn’t in the film, but not for the reasons I had walking in the door.
Art does not owe us good people. It owes us its message and values. That bad people can make great or meaningful art isn’t new information. However, we are not always as conveniently armed with that information as we were with Parker andBirth, and that is why this moment is different than, say, a Woody Allen or Bill Cosby moment. Each of us gets to decide for once if we will partake of the art before it happens to us. And were it not a film about Nat Turner I very likely might have made a different decision. This isn’t the same moment as all of the moments when we retroactively discover a sin after the fact, weigh the psychic cost, and then are compelled to find ways to wash our hands. Even then, the most important part of that equation is the psychic cost. I cannot carry yours and you certainly cannot carry mine, but it is real and it has the weight of a real thing.
More on that psychic cost in a minute. For now, I want to show you how Parker proves he can’t be trusted.
There aren’t a lot of hard facts on Nat Turner, and even the most outlandish portrayals throughout history (Styron’sConfessions of Nat Turner most notably) have notable proponents (Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates). What concerned me here is that Parker’s film fills in the gaps of history more with missed opportunities than insights. While I appreciate that he opted not to paint Turner as a religious maniac infatuated with white women, he failed to give us a Turner any more realized or possessing a deeper motivation than the titular protagonist of Django Unchained.
Which brings us to another missed opportunity: religion. The shots it takes with Christianity and the role of religion in enslavement are paramount to any telling of Turner’s story, and there is a lot that can be mined out of how that institution may have informed Turner’s revolt. Parker tries to make the symbiotic slavery/religion arrangement ironic and compelling, and for the most part succeeds, but then dumps it almost entirely for action mode, or at least doesn’t sell it in earnest. By the end, much of the power of the observation is buried, and the low-budget Last Temptation of Christ ending doesn’t fill the thematic hole left here.
Birth buckles under the ham-fistedness of its caricatures, substituting paint by numbers tropes of every person in the script for pre-programmed responses and emotions. Even the casting plays too much in this regard: anytime you see Roger Guenveur Smith in a movie you’ve got a fifty-fifty shot of him playing an over the top Uncle Tom. You know on sight that Jackie Earle Haley is going to play a chew-spitting psychopath. You rarely hire guys like this to carry your rom-com, and the film suffers from these kind of on-the-nose theatrics. Not that the women in this film fare much better. The ones marked for rape – Gabrielle Union and Aja Naomi King – are traditional Hollywood flawless beauties designed to show you how tragic rape is, as if it needed any help. This is one of numerous times while watching the film that I thought 12 Years a Slave – a superior film in almost every way – dealt with the same issues better. In 12 Years, rape isn’t reserved for the pretty; it is a crime of power yielded over the helpless, and at power’s whim and convenience. Power is not picky about its victims. You cannot rise above power’s lust, you cannot hide under being not-as-cute. Birth doesn’t have these edges. There’s plenty of blame to go around Parker’s set on this one, but the casting was suspect right out the gate. The actors mentioned here are great actors, but this film totally telegraphed its punches by using them in these roles. I vacillated between trying to figure out if Parker was shooting for some kind of resonance here with these choices or if their casting was just indulgent rookie mistakes. In the end, I decided Parker simply wasn’t politically savvy enough to make this film good, that he is unable to read the needs of the time (then or now), and that realization hit me when the worst thing that could have happened in a Nat Turner movie actually did.
Half of the audience belly-laughed.
Black actors
