If your cinematic diet has been light on historical backbone lately, Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation comes storming in like Nat Turner himself, Bible in one hand, machete in the other, ready to carve a long-overdue hole in Hollywood’s collective conscience. It’s a visceral, uneven, but unmistakably urgent call-and-response between America’s past sins and its present amnesia. Four stars because perfection is dull, and also because half the Academy would spontaneously combust if I gave it five.
Few passion projects gestate longer than an elephant, but Parker started writing this script back in 2009, betting his career that audiences would show up for a slave-rebellion epic headlined by a Black actor. Conventional wisdom said nope. Conventional wisdom also said film titles don’t provoke fistfights, but Parker leaned straight into D.W. Griffith’s white-supremacist legacy and slapped the same name on his film to reclaim it, colonizing the colonizer, one marquee at a time.
Fast-forward to Sundance 2016: after 27 budget-strained Georgia shooting days and $100 K of Parker’s own cash, Nation detonated the festival, winning both the Grand Jury and Audience awards, and sparking a $17.5 million bidding war that still sets accountants’ hearts aflutter. Fox Searchlight snagged distribution rights in the richest deal in Sundance history, proving once again that moral urgency can be monetized if you package it with good cinematography.
Casting reads like an indie-film fantasy league: Parker as Turner, Armie Hammer as plantation owner Samuel, Colman Domingo, Aunjanue Ellis, Gabrielle Union, and Jackie Earle Haley doing what Jackie Earle Haley does best, oozing menace. The production squeezed blood from a stone (or cotton boll) by shooting on former Georgia plantations; you can almost feel the Spanish moss judging everyone. Parker’s kinetic direction keeps the camera low and close, the better to smell the sweat and fear, and when that a cappella rendition of “Strange Fruit” drops in the trailer, you remember why protest songs age better than politicians.
Plot-wise, the film hews to Turner’s arc: childhood prophecy, itinerant preaching, systemic brutality, and finally the 1831 uprising that terrified an entire slave-holding South. The violence is graphic but necessary; Parker refuses to let the audience daydream its way through enslavement. Occasionally, the pacing slips into Sunday-school sermonizing, but even the preachiest passages land harder than a master’s whip.
Critically, the film opened to a respectable 72 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, receiving praise for its conviction but criticism for narrative lumps. However, it collapsed to 61 percent in its second weekend, ultimately topping out at a modest $16 million domestic. Audiences loved the message; date-night crowds evidently preferred less flaying.
Then came the thundercloud: resurfaced 1999 rape allegations against Parker and co-writer Jean Celestin. Parker was acquitted, Celestin’s conviction overturned, yet the discourse swallowed the movie whole, becoming a referendum on art, accountability, and whose trauma gets screen time. For some, the film’s righteous fury felt undercut by its creator’s history; for others, the controversy only underscored Hollywood’s selective morality.
Nearly a decade later, The Birth of a Nation feels newly relevant. A sitting president just ghosted Juneteenth and quietly shunted Dr. King’s bust to a side room, emblems moved as casually as furniture, history erased with an interior-design shrug. Parker’s film, whatever its imperfections, refuses that erasure. It drags buried truths into the light and dares you to look away, mash-cutting from 1831 Southampton County to today’s news ticker without asking permission.
So watch it, argue with it, let it bruise your complacency. In an era when memory is optional and statues are apparently on wheels, The Birth of a Nation still plants its flag (or perhaps its noose-shaped flag) in the soil and shouts, “Remember.”
⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4/5 Stars)
#NatTurnerRises #HistoryUncensored #CinemaWithTeeth #JuneteenthMatters #MLKStillWatching
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