Critics On Birth Of A Nation

With Nate Parker’s Birth Of  A Nation set to hit theaters this week, here’s what critics and some of your favorite rappers are saying about the Nat Turner biopic.

Ever since it was announced that Parker was filming a movie about Turner’s rebellion, people have been salivating at the thought of a slave movie where the slaves get bloody revenge.

The first trailer fed the appetite, while the second trailer seemed to be a little calmer. Prospects for the movie were almost ruined over the summer though when a rape case from Parker’s past came to back to light in the media. That whole “oh he married a White girl” thing didn’t seem to help the cause either.

Select media and other tastemakers have already seen the film while the rest of the public gets to see it starting this Friday, October 7.

Here’s what critics are saying so far.

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Author Danielle McGuire for The Hollywood Reporter:

If this is the kind of history “curriculum” Parker and Fox Searchlight have in mind, then Parker’s dream of using his film to plumb the horrors of the past to understand our present will fail. Instead, he will have created just another film that uses women and the defense of women’s bodily integrity as a prop to glorify male violence. And how different is that premise from the one put forward in D.W. Griffith’s 1915 Birth of a Nation?

A.O. Scott For The New York Times:

“The Birth of a Nation” is not “only a movie”; it’s precisely a movie, an ambitious attempt to corral the contradictions of history within the conventions of popular narrative. It dwells, sometimes too comfortably, sometimes too clumsily and sometimes with bracing effectiveness, within long-established patterns of mainstream movie storytelling. In the context of Hollywood history, Mr. Parker is less a revolutionary than a revisionist, adapting old strategies to new purposes, inflecting familiar tropes of violence and sentimentality with fresh meanings…The movie, uneven as it is, has terrific momentum and passages of concentrated visual beauty. The acting is strong even when the script wanders into thickets of rhetoric and mystification. And despite its efforts to simplify and italicize the story, it’s admirably difficult, raising thorny questions about ends and means, justice and mercy, and the legacy of racism that lies at the root of our national identity. There is still a lot of reckoning to be done. Birth is a messy business. And so is what comes after.

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Los Angeles Premiere of ‘The Birth of a Nation’ held at Cinerama Dome – Arrivals
Featuring: Nate Parker
Where: Los Angeles, California, United States
When: 21 Sep 2016
Credit: Adriana M. Barraza/WENN.com

Vinson Cunningham for The New Yorker:

“The Birth of a Nation” is not worth the efforts of its defenders. It’s hard even to call it a successful attempt at propaganda. The early euphoria surrounding the movie was prompted by the way it seemed to answer the demands of its time, sublimating the eye-for-an-eye Old Testament ethos of such fiery agitators as Stokely Carmichael and Elijah Muhammad into the safer precincts of the screen. That fire was checked by a different political imperative: the need to listen to and respect the stories of women who have suffered at the hands of men. The first telling of Turner’s story was prompted by fear—a political force, yes, but also a primal feeling, as palpable today as it was almost two hundred years ago, in Southampton County.