A new song

The Birth of a Nation

Crit

Wow, that sure puts losing the wild-card game in perspective.

This is a film more powerful than good, but it could be an awful lot better than it is and still fit that description. I could complain that only one white person (played by Penelope Ann Miller) displays even a modicum of decency, and that the dissolute plantation owner (Armie Hammer) is the next-best cracker only by the marginal virtue of being more morally weak than actively evil, but what do I expect: that the murderous rapist slave catcher (Jackie Earle Haley) is going to repent his sins at the moment of his comeuppance? Let's face it: white people suck, we always have, and the best anybody can hope for is that some day we'll stop, or at least get better.

There is a moment of moral revelation, but it's by preacher-for-hire-out-by-his-owner Nat Turner (Nate Parker, who also wrote, directed, produced, and presumably helped out with craft services as well), who comes to recognize that the word of the god in whom he has always believed and trusted can be warped to the most ungodly purposes. He enlists an ragtag army of barely armed slaves and leads them to Jerusalem, the conveniently named location of the county's arsenal. Three guesses how that turns out.

Fortunately, since then everything has gotten better.

Trailers

• Jackie--Natalie Portman in the title role.
• Get Out--Twenty-first-century middle-class white people even more dangerous than the ones I saw today.
• Live by Night--Ben Affleck (who also wrote and directed [read in jack-of-all-trades joke from above], as a Boston gangster.