Birth of a Nation. Nate Parker, dir. Whew! A powerful movie, although my reaction was on a par with Nat Turner’s after his first victim. The buildup to the gore is the powerful stuff as the Turner boy grows up in slavery and becomes a preacher for his fellow slaves. The whites cover a wide spectrum here, from faux sympathies for their victims to indifference to out-and-out evil SOBs. My only real complaint about the story beyond the normal Hollywood distortion of history—Turner had several masters, I believe—is that the situation for slaves in the South during that era was much worse than depicted.

Parker, who also wrote the script, does a good job portraying the doomed Nat Turner.  Hammer does well as the alcoholic master Samuel Turner too. Mark Boone Junior as the Rev. Zalthall convinces Samuel Turner to take his black preacher on tour to preach to blacks on other plantations. In this way, Nat Turner is exposed to the general plight of Southern slaves and meets the evil despots who own them, some making his own master almost look like a saint. Turner builds up a network this way that forms the core of the rebels.

In spite of flaws—stretches seemed painfully slow, for example—this is one of those movies where you have to say, “How could this have been allowed to happen?”  Slavery, not the rebellion!  The U.S. can never cleanse slavery from the national conscience. It is our holocaust and white America the Nazis. It took us nearly a century to eradicate institutionalized slavery when all we needed to do was apply the Constitution and its Bill of Rights. It boggles the mind. But many things are like this, and we must look forward: the past is done, no matter how evil it was. We must take the progressive outlook, which includes never letting this ever happen again.

In libris libertas…   

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