Racially themed films reflect times
‘ TO PUT THEM IN A BOX — AS ‘BLACK FILMS’ OR WHATEVER — WOULD JUST BE MORE RACISM, FRANKLY’, SAYS TIFF’S ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
The Birth of a Nation, Hidden Figures and Loving are three films with the same theme (racism), the same ambitions (Oscar glory) and the same pathway into theatres (big studio labels).
All three, along with several other movies that examine racial politics, are set to create thunderclaps at the Toronto International Film Festival, which represents the unofficial starting gate for the 2017 Academy Awards.
Yet these pictures, as pointed out by Cameron Bailey, the festival’s artistic director, “could not be addressing race in more different ways, and to put them in a box — as ‘ black films’ or whatever — would just be more racism, frankly.”
Speaking by telephone, Bailey added, “I think it’s fair to have a conversation about their similarities, but I think it’s almost more important to be aware of their differences.”
Bailey’s concern is real, especially given the shorthand that is forming around certain films on the early awards circuit and the #OscarsSoWhite outrage that defined the last two awards cycles. In conversations about the contours of the coming season, some Hollywood players have started bifurcating (some would say segregating) award candidates — the films that examine racism and the black experience on one hand, and everything else on the other.
Another worry involves diminishing artistic experience, or “flattening,” as Bailey put it, which can happen when films are narrowly defined and labelled.
Giving as an example Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, a poetic film about a young black man growing up in a poor section of Miami, Bailey said in a followup email, “The histories that shape the black experience are crucial to Moonlight, but they don’t contain it, any more than Foxcatcher and Whiplash should be defined mainly as movies about the white experience.” (Moonlight will also play in Toronto.)
A closer look at Loving, Hidden Figures and The Birth of a Nation — the first two counting on Toronto to rev up their awards chances, and the third hoping for a resuscitation — reveals drastically different artistic statements and cinematic approaches.
Loving, written and directed by Southern filmmaker Jeff Nichols, is a slow- paced relationship drama that imparts its messages — love is love; let’s try harder to appreciate one another — in a whisper. It looks at an interracial marriage in 1950s Virginia. Nichols (“Mud”) based his latest film on the true story of Richard and Mildred Loving, whose marriage broke their state’s antimiscegenation law and led to the landmark Supreme Court ruling that deemed marriage a human right.
“All this talk of civil rights,” a friend tells Mildred ( played by Ruth Negga) as they watch television news. “You need to get you some.”
Nichols said he wanted Loving, which also stars Joel Edgerton, to draw its power from subtlety. “It’s hard to make movies that people experience instead of just receive,” Nichols said, adding that the film’s intimate feeling was meant to humanize the issue at stake. “Especially in an election year like we’re in, everyone goes to their corners and gets ready to fight, and what gets forgotten are the people at the centre of these topics.”
Bailey noted t hat Loving counted integration dramas like Gentleman’s Agreement as antecedents. That film, directed by Elia Kazan and examining anti- Semitism, won best picture at the Academy Awards in 1948.
Taking a much more rollicking approach is Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures, which tells the true story of black women who calculated rocket trajectories for NASA in the early 1960s. Hidden Figures, from Chernin Entertainment and Fox 2000, a unit of 20th Century Fox, is not yet finished. But about 30 minutes of footage will be shown in Toronto, followed by a street concert by Pharrell Williams, who wrote songs for the film.
The footage begins with the movie’s three lead actresses — Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe — stranded on the side of a rural road after their car breaks down. An arrogant white cop arrives, and the central conflict is established: these are three smart, hardworking, patriotic Americans who find themselves put down, underestimated and insulted because of their race.
In a scene at NASA that finds Henson’s math whiz abruptly assigned to an office filled with hostile, white, male engineers, she approaches the only other woman, who is also white, to ask directions to the restroom. The icy response: “I have no idea where your bathroom is.” The only “coloured” lavatory, as it turns out, is across campus.
At a time of particular togetherness — everyone in the film, black and white, is galvanized behind putting a man into space — the races could not be farther apart.
“This i sn’ t a black movie, and this isn’t a women’s movie: this is an everyone movie,” said Margo Lee Shetterly, who wrote the book from which Hidden Figures is adapted. She continued: “Black history has always been about slavery and civil rights. There is a whole lot more than that. I want the full spectrum of the African- American experience reflected in the same way that other American experiences are reflected.”
Perhaps the most scrutinized film at Toronto will be The Birth of a Nation, a sweeping antebellum melodrama with scenes of horrifying violence. The fiery film, based on the Nat Turner slave rebellion of 1831, was considered an Oscar front- runner after its sizzling debut at the last Sundance Film Festival.
But in recent weeks, following renewed attention on a 1999 rape case, controversy has swirled around Nate Parker, the film’s director, writer, producer and star. Parker was charged — and later acquitted — in that case, which occurred when he was a student at Pennsylvania State University; Parker’s former roommate Jean McGianni Celestin, who has a story credit on The Birth of a Nation, was convicted of sexual assault, but his conviction was later overturned. Their accuser later committed suicide.
Parker declined an interview request for this article, but he will attend the Toronto festival. The Birth of a Nation is scheduled for release in theatres on Oct. 7.
Parker has noted that his film, which also stars Armie Hammer and Aja Naomi King, bears similarities to Braveheart, which won the best picture Oscar in 1996. That film tells the story of William Wallace (played by Mel Gibson), who roused and united the medieval Scots against their English oppressors.
“Nat Turner became a leader against incredible odds,” Parker is quoted as saying in the film’s production notes. “So often when we see slavery in popular culture, it is through stories of suffering and endurance. But Nat Turner’s is a more incendiary narrative; he was a slave but also a true rebel against injustice.”