As effective as this might be from an audience response standpoint, it does the real Turner a disservice, by flattening him out into a vigilante. But Parker's film focuses on this element to the near-exclusion of everything else. Obviously, sexual exploitation was a huge motivating factor in this and other slave rebellions, as well as in peaceful forms of anti-slavery activism.
Turner is depicted as having the same motivation that drove the Klansmen in “The Birth of a Nation”: protecting women’s virtue.
Roger guenveur smith rise of a nation movie#
The final third of the movie is a succession of small but intense skirmishes between Turner’s militia and local pro-slavery whites, including Jackie Earle Haley as a “paddy roller,” a blatantly racist policeman mainly concerned with protecting slave owners from slaves and preventing escapes. He has his first vision of blood when his wife Cherry Ann ( Aja Naomi King) is beaten and raped by slave catchers, and is pushed over the edge when another woman, Esther ( Gabrielle Union), is raped as well.
In the film, the adult Turner is specifically infuriated by the sexual abuse of women at the hands of white slaveowners. It's a tale told with conviction but also tedious single-mindedness, as well as a self-regarding quality that makes the noble tone seem untrustworthy. That's fine it's part of a tradition as old as cinema-older, really.īut Parker pursues this strategy in such a simplistic way that you're left with yet another movie about a speechifying avenger anointed by the cosmos. It’s a “counter-myth”-to use the phrase Oliver Stone employed when defending “ JFK” -designed to supplant Griffith’s. The film sticks to the basics of a true story while crafting a righteous fable in which a sweetheart of a hero hallucinates himself as Christ and sees angels watching over him. The screenplay treats him as a combination of Moses, Jesus and Sir William Wallace, a warrior-prophet who was identified as special from childhood, when a shaman practicing forbidden African religious rituals told him he was destined for great things. The movie’s Turner experiences all that and more.
Roger guenveur smith rise of a nation free#
He spoke of communing with “the Spirit that spoke to the prophets in former days” and becoming inspired to lead a revolt to free his people. The real Turner was afflicted by visions that might have been diagnosed as mental illness. “This is a blow against white supremacy and racism in this country and abroad,” Parker told reporters at the Sundance Film Festival, where his independently funded debut premiered to a standing ovation and sold to Fox Searchlight for $17.5 million. Griffith’s formally innovative but KKK-glorifying silent epic, which means that anyone who searches for Griffith’s film on Google will come up with Parker’s as well. The very title is an Information Age provocation: it’s the same name as D.W. history, when those who would “take back America” encounter widespread pushback from people who never got their turn at the wheel. He and his followers-freed slaves who traveled from house to house, killing slave owners and their families, including children and infants, with farm implements-represented an Old Testament inversion of slave owners’ logic: Those who classify others as inhuman have relinquished the right to be thought of as human themselves. “The Birth of a Nation” is a revenge movie for an aggrieved time in U.S. Turner is one of the earliest African-Americans to exemplify those qualities on the public stage, and he expressed them with such unrelenting violence that he’s still glossed over in many school textbooks.
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