The Birth of a Nation (2016)

It's difficult to love something so wrenching and violent, but this story of Nat Turner, an educated slave leading an uprising twenty years before emancipation, is quite moving and beautifully photographed. Apparently after Nate Parker starred in Beyond the Lights he told his agents he wouldn't do anything else until he had played Turner on screen. Not only did Parker play the lead, he directed, wrote the screenplay, co-wrote the story with Jean McGianni Celestin, and produced. That could be the biggest drawback--with one person calling all the shots, there may be just a few too many loving reaction shots and moody meditations.

That said, the acting is good. Not just Parker, but also Armie Hammer (last blogged for The Lone Ranger) as his former playmate turned owner Samuel, Penelope Ann Miller (covered in The Artist) as Samuel's mother, Jackie Earle Haley (profiled in Dark Shadows) as a slave hunter, Aunjanue Ellis (lots of TV and her movies include Lovely & Amazing (2001), Ray (2004), Notorious, The Help, and  Get On Up) as Turner's mother, Esther Scott (I've seen some of her dozens of roles) as his grandmother, and Aja Naomi King (before 45 episodes of How to Get Away with Murder she was in Damsels in Distress and some other things) as his love interest.

The D.W. Griffiths' silent film; The Birth of a Nation (1915) showed the Ku Klux Klan in a positive light and Parker intentionally and ironically shared the name. William Styron's 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner won the Pulitzer the following year, when ten African-American writers published The Second Crucifixion of Nat Turner.

Cinematographer Elliot Davis (among his varied credits I've seen, among others, Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead (1995), Larger Than Life (1996), Gray's Anatomy (1996) (Spalding Gray's monologue, not the TV series), Out of Sight (1998), Breakfast of Champions (1999), Forces of Nature (1999), I Am Sam (2001), White Oleander (2002), Thirteen (2003), Lords of Dogtown (2005),  and The Iron Lady) provides the sweeping photography and Henry Jackman (last blogged for Kingsman: The Secret Service) the background music, supplemented with field gospel songs, rap, and pop, some of which can be streamed here.

Thirty producers (including Parker) put this in the category of producers plethora, my list of top-heavy movies, and Rotten Tomatoes' critics 77% and its audiences' 75 put this in the category of maligned but still worth seeing, despite the revelation that Parker and Celestin, his Penn State classmate, raped a female freshman in 1999, were accused and acquitted, and the victim killed herself in 2012.