Nat Turner’s slave rebellion whips big screen to life

The Birth of a Nation Running time: 2hrs Starring: Nate Parker, Armie Hammer, Penelope Ann Miller, Aja Naomi King Director: Nate Parker NATE Parker directs and stars in a biopic of Nat Turner, who led an early 19th century slave revolt. At last it brings the story of Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion to the screen in a manner that will hit home with many viewers.

A labour of love pursued by Parker for seven years, the film vividly captures an assortment of slavery’s brutalities while also emphasising Turner’s justifications for his assaults on slave holders.

Nat Turner was taught to read and eventually groomed as a preacher for his fellow slaves in Southampton, Virginia. Eventual exposure to the deepest horrors of the “peculiar institution” roused him to action, as did his unusual religious visions and revised interpretations of biblical passages.

In Parker’s script young Nat Turner (Parker) is largely shielded from the worst depredations by a master roughly his own age, Samuel Turner, who’s trying to keep his father’s plantation going through difficult financial times. Nat can even exercise a degree of influence over Samuel, as when he suggests that Samuel buy the attractive teenage slave Cherry (Aja Naomi King) so he, Nat, can marry her.

The film offers a succession of vivid (if just briefly gory) setpiece depictions of white-on-black brutality. Cherry is attacked for no reason and, for his part, Nat is struck for merely preaching to slaves.

When Nat is discovered to have baptised a white man, it’s simply too much for the local bigots, who have him whipped. Gradually, Nat’s personal scales of justice begin to tilt the other way; a man who once duelled another over conflicting interpretations of the Gospel, Nat now takes the edict “smite the oppressor” to heart, using it as grounds to deliver his people from tyranny.

As it is, Parker conveys the basics of what happened but without the more profound sense of what this incident represented historically. He severely telescopes Turner’s final weeks on earth, a period that could have been developed into an exceedingly dramatic chapter of its own. – Hollywood Reporter