The Birth of a Nation: Black Men Fighting Back, Then and Now

Jeremy BeckReviews
Nate Parker in the complex, controversial "Birth of a Nation"

No movie exists entirely within its own bubble, but the clamor surrounding The Birth of a Nation is so loud, it’s threatened to silence the actual film. When it premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival, The Birth of a Nation was hailed not only as a good movie—it won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award—but as a timely and potent corrective to the monochrome of the Academy Awards, which were squirming through the second consecutive year of #OscarsSoWhite. But in August, reports surfaced that Nate Parker, the film’s writer-director as well as its star, had been charged with rape in 1999 along with Jean McGianni Celestin, who shares a story credit with Parker. In 2001, Parker was acquitted (Celestin was convicted, but the verdict was overturned on appeal); then, in 2012, his accuser killed herself. This tragedy—combined with the fact that the film features a rape whose accuracy has been questioned—ignited a firestorm that has engulfed the picture, resulting in boycotts, short-circuited interviews, and a marketing campaign that could charitably be described as tentative. Both the breadth and the volume of the rhetoric surrounding The Birth of a Nation‘s release make it challenging to look past the movie’s context to see its content.

Yet here we are. By which I mean, my job as a film critic is not to analyze The Birth of a Nation’s Best Picture prospects, nor is it to reconcile Nate Parker the person with Nate Parker the artist. (It is certainly not to determine the validity of the sexual assault allegations against Parker or to assess the prospect of causation with the alleged victim’s suicide, tasks for which I am wholly unqualified.) It is instead to evaluate this movie as, well, a movie. And on that score, perhaps the most interesting thing about The Birth of a Nation is how ordinary it is. What we have here is a prototypical biopic, alternately stimulating and stultifying. You’ve seen movies like this before, which means you are much more likely to remember this one for what it represents than for what it contains. Read More

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Deepwater Horizon: The Ship Is Sinking, and So Are Profit Margins

Jeremy BeckReviews
Mark Wahlberg in Peter Berg's "Deepwater Horizon"

At one point in Peter Berg’s geopolitical action thriller The Kingdom, Jamie Foxx tells a Saudi official, “America’s not perfect, but we are good at this.” The “this” he’s referring to is criminal investigation, but as Berg’s career has gone on, his films have played as a variation on this central theme of American competence. He makes movies about strong-willed, muscular men and women who excel at problem-solving and crisis management. It’s historical fiction with a nationalist tint; in recreating specific, disastrous events, Berg venerates the broader (and, in his view, distinctly red-white-and-blue) virtues of teamwork, loyalty, and perseverance. The guy who played Linda Fiorentino’s hapless patsy in The Last Seduction has somehow fashioned himself into American cinema’s chief patriot.

Well, maybe vice-chief. Berg’s current leading man of choice is Mark Wahlberg, our great nation’s consensus avatar of blue-collar heroism. In Lone Survivor, the fact-based story of a kill mission in Afghanistan gone awry, Berg put Wahlberg through an especially brutal ringer, chronicling how a brave solider used his strength and his smarts to avoid seemingly certain death. Now the director and his star have returned with Deepwater Horizon, a meticulous reenactment of the explosion (and resulting oil spill) that destroyed a rig off the coast of Louisiana in 2010. The names may have changed, but Berg’s template remains the same: Deliberately establish the players and the setting, then scrupulously illustrate how everything gets blown to hell. Read More

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Morris from America: In a Strange Land, Father Still Knows Best

Jeremy BeckReviews
Markees Christmas and Craig Robinson in "Morris from America"

Early in the modest and winsome crowd-pleaser Morris from America, a father scolds his son for writing vulgar, misogynistic rap lyrics. When the son counters that his father curses constantly, the father explains, “I’m not mad because it’s explicit, I’m mad because it’s bullshit.” That judgment applies to parts of Morris from America itself. A slender study of disenchanted youths, the film is sometimes false and artificial, even when it postures as authentic. Yet the incisive honesty with which the father delivers his verdict exemplifies what makes this small, heartfelt movie worth watching. As a portrait of a teenager straining to find himself in a cruel and uncaring world, it’s fairly rote. But as a story of the fragile-yet-powerful bond between parent and child, it is wonderfully specific and true.

The son in question is Morris (Markees Christmas), and you can guess where he’s from. The more interesting detail is where he lives; Morris resides in Heidelberg, the touristy German town where his widowed father coaches soccer. His status as an immigrant lends some spice to the film’s otherwise mild recipe. By which I mean, despite its European location, Morris from America—which was written and directed by Chad Hartigan—fits snugly within one of the most durable genres of American independent cinema: the coming-of-age story. It tells the tale of a diffident outsider who struggles to connect with his peers and understand his elders, but who also, thanks to the careful nourishment of his confidence and the attentions of a pretty girl, gradually discovers how to accept and assert himself. As the movie progresses, you can be sure that Morris will fall in love, make some questionable decisions, get his heart broken, lie to his father, and ultimately learn some valuable life lessons. Read More

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The Light Between Oceans: On a Spit of Land, Still Lost at Sea

Jeremy BeckReviews
Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander in "The Light Between Oceans"

Derek Cianfrance isn’t subtle. His movies traffic in heavy sentiment and obvious themes, and they are systematically designed to induce trauma and heartache. If he were less talented, this would feel like manipulative hackwork, but thankfully, he’s as skilled as he is blunt. In Blue Valentine, he performed a brutal autopsy of a marriage while it was still alive, in the process coaxing superlative performances from Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling. He followed that with The Place Beyond the Pines, a striking, generational crime saga of failed fathers and sons. His new film, The Light Between Oceans, maintains his twin fixations on matrimony and family, striving to wring sweat from your brow and tears from your eyes.

It does not quite succeed. The movie is too deliberate, too mannered, to incite the response it so plainly seeks to provoke. But there is still much to admire in The Light Between Oceans, beginning with its superlative craftsmanship. This is a gorgeous film, with magnificent cinematography from Adam Arkapaw, the talented lenser who gave us the unforgettable tracking shot in True Detective, as well as the ethereal beauty of Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake. Here, capitalizing on Cianfrance’s preference for shooting on location, he delivers frame after frame of stunning naturalism: gentle sunrises peeking over a hillside, waves crashing onto rocky shoals, ships slicing through the mist like wooden blades. These images are accompanied by the tinkling piano and whispering woodwinds that could only be orchestrated by the great Alexandre Desplat. It’s all rather lovely. Read More

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Sully: He’s Not a Hero. Just Ask the Government.

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Hanks is a haunted hero in Clint Eastwood's "Sully"

In the dreadful 2012 flop Trouble with the Curve, Clint Eastwood plays a grizzled baseball scout who has grown disgusted with the sport’s increasing reliance on analytics and technology. “Anybody who uses computers doesn’t know a damn thing about this game,” he growls at one point. His irascible critique encapsulates the film’s worldview, namely, that the classicist’s wisdom of observational experience will always vanquish the modernist’s reliance on statistical data. That broad thesis is now the animating force behind Sully, Eastwood’s brisk, hackneyed, intermittently diverting reenactment of an American tragedy that wasn’t. It’s the kind of movie where the officious villains blindly trust computer simulations, only to be taken aback when they’re informed that they’ve failed to account for that most vexing of variables: humanity.

The majority of the humanity in Sully derives from Tom Hanks, an actor who, luckily for Eastwood, could imbue a paperclip with an aura of moral and professional authority. Here he provides the necessary blunt-force gravitas as Capt. Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot better known as, well, you know. The film opens with anonymous voices screaming Sully’s name as an airplane glides above the streets of Queens before crashing into a skyscraper. It’s a nightmarish image, which makes sense, given that it is born from Sully’s nightmares. In actuality, as you will no doubt remember, things went quite differently: On January 15, 2009, after U.S. Airways Flight 1549 suffered power failure in both engines due to bird strikes, Sully successfully landed the plane on the Hudson River, saving the lives of all 155 souls on board. The incident was swiftly dubbed “the Miracle on the Hudson”, with Sully as its chief architect. Roll credits. Read More

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