The Birth of a Nation (2016)

THE BIRTH OF A NATION             C+                 

USA  (120 mi)  2016  ‘Scope  d:  Nate Parker

The American soil is full of the corpses of my ancestors, through four hundred years and at least three wars...  What one begs the American people to do, for all our sakes, is simply to accept our history.

—James Baldwin on the 100th anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery, 1965, in a debate at Cambridge University with William F. Buckley, on the question: “Is the American Dream at the expense of the American Negro?” Classics of American Political and Constitutional Thought: ..., also on video, James Baldwin Debates William F. Buckley (1965) - YouTube (58:57)

Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.   —Thomas Jefferson, opening quote   

Another Hollywood depiction of slavery supposedly “based on a true story,” this time examining Nat Turner, an American revolutionary figure, the leader of the most notorious slave rebellion in American history in 1831, and while there were hopes that an independent production might provide more historical accuracy, where the black writer/director Nate Parker indicated he was seeking “historical fidelity,” instead he resorts to the same trickery of Hollywood fictionalized embellishments, turning this into an overblown melodrama of the highest order, portraying Turner as a Christ figure, where the finale borrows heavily from Mel Gibson’s THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (2004), with Gibson’s name listed in the final credits, working as an advisor on the script.  While Turner may have been a religious zealot, believing he was chosen by God to lead a revolt to eradicate slavery, which he felt was morally wrong and violated the law of God, this film erroneously portrays him as a man avenging his wife’s vicious gang rape at the hands of slave patrollers, acting as her protector from an event that likely never happened, where his conversion to an insurrectionist happens only when his wife gives him permission to avenge her rape.  As a result, the film completely alters the justification for his actions.  When examining historical events, motivations matter.  In this case, one can only speculate why Parker and his cowriter Jean Celestin decided to add this false narrative.  Curiously, both Parker and Celestin were black roommates on the wrestling team in college at Penn State University in 1999 with both charged with raping a fellow white student while she was intoxicated and unconscious, where she also accused them of harassing and shaming her on campus after she filed charges, including hiring a private investigator to show pictures of her around campus, subjecting her to ridicule, identifying her as the “white girl crying rape!,” causing her to drop out of school, where she eventually committed suicide in 2012.  Fiercely supported by Penn State alumni, the same ones that wanted to excuse assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky when he was found guilty on 45 counts of sexually molesting young men, and Joe Paterno, the head football coach that turned a blind eye, Parker was found not guilty, while Celestin was initially convicted and sentenced to two to four years in prison, which was overturned in 2005 for having insufficient counsel and charges were never refiled.  According to a September 29, 2016 Variety article written by the victim’s sister Sharon Loeffler, "Nate Parker's 'Birth of a Nation' Exploits My Sister All Over Again (Guest Column)":

As her sister, the thing that pains me most of all is that in retelling the story of the Nat Turner slave revolt, they invented a rape scene.  The rape of Turner’s wife is used as a reason to justify Turner’s rebellion.  This is fiction.  I find it creepy and perverse that Parker and Celestin would put a fictional rape at the center of their film, and that Parker would portray himself as a hero avenging that rape.  Given what happened to my sister, and how no one was held accountable for it, I find this invention self-serving and sinister, and I take it as a cruel insult to my sister’s memory.

Whether this alters one’s appreciation for the film is undetermined, but the revelations of this past incident, along with Parker’s refusal to show remorse for what happened, has certainly dampened the enthusiasm of the film coming out of the Sundance Festival, with many declaring an outright refusal to see it.  Parker is mostly known as an actor, starring in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s underrated Beyond the Lights (2014) while also appearing in Denzel Washington’s THE GREAT DEBATERS (2007).  The film has two distinct sections, one on becoming a man and another on being a man, opening in a tribal ceremony in childhood where a birthmark traced back to his ancestors leads elders to pronounce him a prophet, suggesting divine birth, which comes from Turner’s own testimony about himself while being held in prison, transcribed by Richard R. Gray in 1831,  The Confessions of Nat Turner. Without anointing him to an epic hero, as the film does, it’s important to remember that Nat Turner is just an ordinary man who was raised in the dehumanized conditions of slavery and made to witness the atrocities that accompany slavery.  The choice that he made to revolt against the system of tyranny and oppression is a startling one, where his insurrection led to savage results, as he and his rebels killed at least ten men, fourteen women, and thirty-one children.  That last figure is a particularly brutal reality, as it reflects what happens when dehumanized people are stripped of hope, as they are left with no other option but to behave in an equally inhumane fashion, where violence breeds violence, similar to the black-on-black violence that ravages today’s inner cities, where shootings and staggering murder rates are a stark legacy of historical oppression.  While the film may attempt to establish this link to the present, it fails miserably, as the effort is undermined by mythologizing Turner and forcing him into the role of a one-dimensional super hero, literally valorizing black manhood, like SHAFT (1971) or Django Unchained (2012), which plays into all the other white-washed Hollywood versions of black history, even though in this case it’s written and told by a black man.  Or put differently, the road to hell is paved by good intentions.  While there’s something almost inadvertently admirable about this film, especially its occasional artistic touches, it ultimately fails to make the case of bringing the historical relevancy of the past into the present, connecting it to the Black Lives Matter movement, for instance.  This film will not change anyone’s minds, as those who know it already know it, and those that don’t either won’t see the film or won’t be persuaded by the content.  In the ensuing hysteria following the rebellion, fearful that other slaves may revolt, states overreacted by passing laws making it illegal to teach blacks how to read or write, creating an educational gap that societally has never been bridged.  

  

Surprisingly, what works best is everything that happens prior to the insurrection, where it’s simply a portrayal of day-to-day life under slavery.   As a child, Nat is skipping around and playing with his slave owner’s son Sam, where the two become best friends, though each retreats into decidedly different households come dinner time, Sam to the mansion and Nat to the slave quarters.  This film inaccurately shows personal cabins for slave families, something that was certainly not the case in Southampton, Virginia where there were no private living quarters for slaves.  Without explanation, we discover Nat has the capacity to read as a small child, something noticed by Sam’s mother Elizabeth (Penelope Ann Miller), bringing him to live inside the mansion where she teaches him The Bible.  Nat’s father is run off the plantation when he is caught stealing food, forced to disappear into the night and never be seen again.  Jumping ahead to Nat (Nate Parker) as a young man, we see that Sam (Armie Hammer) still considers him a friend, believing him trustworthy, where Nat lives with his mother (Aunjanue Ellis) and grandmother (Esther Scott), where they are portrayed as a loving family.  That, in itself, is a revelation, as slaves are rarely depicted as capable of having intelligence and human feelings.  These bonds grow even more intimate with the appearance of Cherry (Aja Naomi King), as Nat actually persuades Sam to purchase her in a slave auction, with a young black boy holding up a sign that reads “Slaves for Sale.”  She ends up as the personal property of one of Sam’s sisters, working inside the mansion along with Esther (Gabrielle Union), a silent character who never utters a word of dialogue throughout the entire film.  In an op-ed for The Los Angeles Times, Union, who was raped at gunpoint at the age of 19, explained that in Esther’s silence “she represents countless black women who have been and continue to be violated.  Women without a voice, without power.  Women in general.  But black women in particular.”  Nat has worked the cotton fields since childhood days, making it difficult to find private moments alone with Cherry, where the budding romance, eventual marriage, and having a daughter actually has a degree of love and tender grace to it, offering a delicately humanized alternative to the surrounding harshness.  But that soon changes, once Nat is called upon by neighboring slaveholders to have Nat preach to their slaves, teaching them the sanctity of “obedience.”  The horrors that he witnesses while performing this service are inhumanly grotesque, catalyzing his growing awareness, as he notices that Biblical passages on obedience to false prophets are followed by the wrath of an angry God, where he comes to believe his own complicity in the slavery atrocities, delivering more rousing sermons that suggest a deliverance from evil.  One of the most haunting images seen is a mirror image of Nat and Sam as young boys, but here it is a young white girl skipping across the porch with a rope connected to a young black girl following behind with a noose around her neck.  What’s so provocative is the utter obliviousness on their innocent faces, while Nat is profoundly affected by the implication.  As these visits continue, where Sam earns enough money to save his farm, Sam also grows more indifferent to Nat, drinking heavily to vanquish the pain, increasingly treating Nat and others like property, not only allowing, but insisting that Esther be raped by another prominent slave-owner.  The final eruption of violence is as much about personal betrayal as it is about slavery. 

Stations of the Cross (Kreuzweg)

STATIONS OF THE CROSS (Kreuzweg)         D                             

Germany  (107 mi)  2014  d:  Dietrich Brüggemann 

I do adore the sadomodernist masters such as von Trier and Haneke.

—Dietrich Brüggemann interview, Dietrich Brüggemann on “Stations of the Cross”, by Matt Fagerholm from Indie Outlook, October 20, 2014

This highly acclaimed film, co-written by the director and his sister Anna, winner of a Silver Bear for Best Script as well as the Ecumenical Jury Prize at Berlin, has produced the most negative reaction of the year, right alongside Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Volume 1 (2014), which was so incredibly dull and painstakingly pretentious that there was simply no desire to ever see Pt. 2.  The common theme in both is the sheer manipulation factor, where the film’s fixated obsessions are revealed through such a narrow prism that both directors literally force you to accept the movie on their terms, which for some creates an instinctive rebellion against what’s being forced down your throat.  In this case, the film is wrapped under the cloak of religion, following the drama surrounding 14-year old Maria (Lea van Acken) on the eve of her confirmation, where the strict interpretation of her fundamentalist teachings are taken literally, where there is no room for any other point of view, becoming an expression of fanaticism and intolerance, and ultimately death, yet doing so in the name of the Lord, even going so far, as the title suggests, of paralleling the film’s fictional narrative with the final 14 stages (Traditional form) of Christ leading up to the crucifixion, using a Biblical structure in similar fashion with Kieslowski’s modern parable on the Ten Commandments in The Decalogue (Dekalog) (1988-89).  While Kieslowski’s film transcends form, Brüggemann is slavishly ruled by it, creating a brutally suffocating work that is mired in its own wretched miserablism.  Simply put, this is a movie about horrible people, where Maria’s mother (Franziska Weisz) is one of the more vile creatures ever depicted, spewing her venom as God’s will, sewing the seeds of her own daughter’s destruction (while her husband slinks in cowardly silence), and then praising God after she’s dead, one of the most horrific acts of child abuse ever depicted onscreen.  What’s missing in Brüggemann’s film is that extreme forms of intolerant behavior come from all walks of life both inside and outside the church, from the well educated as well as the uneducated, where extremism, not just religious extremism, is a societal epidemic.  How else to explain the rise of school shootings, urban neighborhood crossfire incidents, sexual abductions, or various hate crimes, where victims are targeted for a variety of reasons, none of which make rational sense, so confining this film to such meticulous order and precision is woefully misguided, as it insists upon imposing a straitjacket of logical rationale to irrational acts.  

By confining the focus of the film to a small religious sect based upon the Society of St. Pius X (where the director was confirmed and served as an altar boy ), an anti-Semitic, ultra conservative offshoot of Catholicism that adheres to its own strict rules, much like the Amish and German Mennonite communities in America that continue to abide by antiquated, old-world beliefs, Brüggemann, like Mel Gibson before him in his THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (2004), which this film so zealously resembles, wear their mile-wide sadomasochistic streaks into the heart of the crucifixion story, playing firmly into the expectations of the ardent believers who will praise the strict formal rigidity while ignoring the obvious, where the repetitious, one-note obsessions heard throughout become another form of sanctimonious preaching.  Anyone who is raised by an unwavering doctrine of fear and absolutism, dominated by a tyrannical mother and an equally unequivocal young priest, at the expense of all other widening views, and then cast into the plague that is public school is likely to find that others will find their views preposterous and at odds with the concept of higher learning, where they will soon find themselves the subject of taunting and ridicule.  But it’s the somber, overly serious tone overriding every section of the film that borders on the ridiculous, becoming tiresome after awhile as the viewer is assaulted by ordinary meanness from the mother accompanied by fixated ideas of extremism.  While there are more tolerant views expressed in the film, such as the well-meaning gym teacher (Birge Schade) who attempts to accommodate Maria’s views that rock, gospel, and soul music are satanical expressions of the devil’s work, or a young boy she meets in a library named Christian (Moritz Knapp) who appeals to Maria to come sing in his non-satanic church choir, they are quickly overridden by the dictatorial views of her mother, who is simply a monster whose bullying overbearing voice of unreason and intolerance is the continuous thread that dominates the film.  Maria obsessively adheres to these teachings, depriving herself of all earthly pleasures with the understanding that this is how one expresses obedience to the Lord.     

While the film is a portrait of a tormented family layered in religiosity, this obfuscates the film’s prime intention of being a modern era horror film, where clearly the year’s most wicked creature is at the center, further accentuated by the strict rigidity of style, where the 14 stations are expressed in 14 shots, some lasting as long as ten minutes, most from a fixed position where the camera never moves.  While some will marvel at the technical precision of the film, reminiscent of the praise received for magnificent technical achievement in Sokurov’s RUSSIAN ARK (2002), which was a 99-minute single shot film that roamed through the Russian Hermitage Museum, but the constant chatter the viewer was forced to endure throughout from the long-winded narrator was often overlooked in all the acclaim for making a technically innovative film.  Here, while tragedy abounds, the deck is also stacked, where the contrived and pretentious nature of this film is a bit too absurd to believe, as there is an odd shift that takes place in the middle of the film where Maria changes from being a confused but serious-minded teenager to suddenly finding her ultimate purpose in life, a radical shift that seems all too convenient for the storyline that requires her to be the Christ-like figure whose modern era presence would similarly be pious but completely misunderstood in contemporary society.  With a seemingly inescapable fate, despite the interventions of social workers, police, priests, doctors, family and friends, much like THE EXORCIST (1973), the inevitable progression moves forward as Maria literally deprives herself of food, willing herself to die, believing her death will bring about the miracle needed to save her youngest brother Johannes who still hasn’t spoken his first words at the age of four.  While there are any number of solutions to this problem where society would intervene, doing nothing while allowing a mother to manipulate and browbeat her own daughter into killing herself is not one of them, making this truly one of the ugliest and most manipulative films seen this year, a psychological version of torture porn, and the most hateful film seen since Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012), where the only thing missing would be a selfie moment taken by the mother at the hour of her daughter’s death, seen beaming with delight, as she couldn’t be more proud.  What rot.  

Pieta (2012)

PIETA             D+                  

South Korea  (104 mi)  2012  d:  Kim Ki-duk

Senselessly appalling and repugnant throughout, this pathetically dreary film features overly brutal, utterly despicable human behavior from start to finish, yet it stupefying won the Venice Film Festival, which makes one wonder what else was in competition?  Actually, this was not the initial choice, as while the speakers were at the podium announcing their awards, they initially awarded Best Film to Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012).  However, the festivities were interrupted from a live telecast when a festival official whispered something into the ear of the speaker, where Venice rules only allow any given film a maximum of two major awards, and The Master had already been issued Best Director and Best Actor, awarded jointly to Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix.  So after a brief but embarrassing delay, the Jury, headed by American director Michael Mann, handed out the Golden Lion Best Film to Kim Ki-duk’s PIETA ("Venice Film Festival Jury Yanks Top Prize from 'The Master' (Exclusive)").  Other overlooked films at the fest included the latest from Harmony Korine, Takeshi Kitano, Brilliante Mendoza, also Marco Bellochio’s equally dreadful Dormant Beauty (Bella addormentata) (2012), Ulrich Seidl’s downbeat Paradise: Faith (Paradies: Glaube) (2012), Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder (2012), which had the critics thoroughly confused ("Terrence Malick's To The Wonder confounds Venice press"), but also the near brilliant 2012 Top Ten List #7 Something in the Air (Après mai), Olivier Assayas’s autobiographical account of the political slide after May ’68.  Apparently the Italians held little interest in the French student movement, although in March of ’68 Italian students shut down the University of Rome for 12 days during an anti-war protest.  Kim Ki-duk is one of the few directors to receive more praise abroad on the festival circuit than he does at home, as he’s never been embraced by Korean critics or audiences, and was attacked ferociously in the press by film critic Tony Rayns in a November/December 2004 Film Comment article entitled Sexual Terrorism: The Strange Case of Kim Ki-duk, claiming, among other assertions, that he’s a purveyor of gratuitous violence and misogyny purely for shock and that he “shamelessly plagiarizes,” something Western filmmakers quite commonly do.  Largely self-taught, from a lower class background with no formal training in film, Kim usually focuses on marginalized characters leading morally questionable lives that seem to exist in a universe all their own. 

What apparently captured the attention of the festival was the completely uncompromising aspect of the film, where at least on the surface, the film presents an artificially exaggerated view of a descent into a mercilessly brutal world that only exists in the world of movies, displaying a sadistically crude human quality that has come to be known as torture porn, where the audience is treated to endlessly repetitive sequences of sad and pathetic humans at the bottom of the food chain who are subjected to ruthless cruelty, where Lee Kang-do (Lee Jung-jin) is a collector for underworld loan sharks, and if the money is not there he savagely breaks bones, feeding arms and limbs into industrial machines, or cracking them himself, turning his victims into cripples in order to collect the insurance money needed to repay their debt, subjecting each individual to excruciating pain and a lifetime of dependency on others.  This is shown in such a dispassionate manner, including all the desperate pleading followed by endless screams, that one quickly grows disgusted with having to sit through this nonsense.  The picture of Lee Kang-do is a pathetic wretch of a man, someone with no scruples whatsoever, that trolls the bottom of this Hellish existence by terrorizing weak and thoroughly moronic creatures who would idiotically stoop to borrow money from such an inhumane brute that prowls the neighborhood inflicting nothing but pain.  Out of nowhere, an older woman, Cho Min-soo, arrives at his door claiming to be his long-lost mother, apologizing profusely for abandoning him in childhood.  At first he finds it ridiculous and throws her out, calling her an “Evil bitch!”  But when she persists, he treats her with the same callous disregard he shows everybody else, viciously raping her on the spot.  Despite her prolonged agonizing moans of despair, she doesn’t leave him. 

Somehow this new mother in his life becomes an Angel of Forgiveness, pathetically sobbing her apologies, absolving him of all crimes, cleaning his house, buying him food, and regularly cooking for him.  Her presence suddenly alters his mindset, where he worries about her and begins to depend upon her kindness.  But she is more of an Avenging Angel, a kind of Satan in disguise complete with her own agenda, which sets him in an existential turmoil.  Due to the relentless monotony of neverending brutality, the film bears a similarity to Mel Gibson’s dreadful THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (2004), as both are mindless and nauseating films that are little more than sadistic displays of human torture.  The problem here is the exaggerated tone, where every emotion is so over the top, where characters yell and scream at one another all the time, constantly bickering, calling each other names, making threats, carrying out their threats, screaming in pain, where the film is one long, continuously procrastinated revenge saga, ugly, grotesque, and mercilessly brutal.  Lee Kang-do comes to personify the lowest form of human existence, evil incarnate.  Some have suggested he’s supposed to represent the ruthlessness of capitalism, a heartless economic system that doesn’t care who it destroys, that hears no sympathetic pleas, but simply bulldozes and lays waste to people’s lives in a momentary frenzy of violent, catastrophic destruction, and then moves on to the next person.  Others find meaning in the title, where the Pietà is a masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture by Michelangelo, a subject in Christian art depicting an all-forgiving Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus, the first of a number of Michelangelo sculptures with the same theme.  Anyone who’s seen Kim’s SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER…AND SPRING (2003), where the director himself plays the part of a monk, knows his familiarity with Buddhism and reincarnation, where this overly simplistic parable of evil incarnate seems to suggest that even the lowliest, most despised and hateful creatures on earth have redeeming qualities, where their lives can earn redemption, if not in this life, then the next, much of it underscored by the Kyrie eliason (Lord, have mercy) section of a Catholic mass.  The quietly poetic qualities expressed in the final few moments of the film offer a peaceful visual transcendence, completely at odds with the gruesome violence that comes before, where death chants in a state of perpetual darkness bring the film to a close.