The year is 1809. The place, Southampton County in the state of Virginia. Though judging by the offensive language and racist jokes it could be a working man’s club in the north of England during the 1970’s for the humour is straight out of the Bernard Manning school of comedy. “What do we call a nigger that thinks he can outsmart a white man?” asks a shotgun-wielding redneck. “A dead nigger,” sniggers his accomplice. Cue laughter, cue gunfire.

Nat Turner (Tony Espinosa), a young black boy who along with his parents and grandmother lives in bondage to the cotton-farming Turner family, is struck dumb when his father is forced to flee after accidentally killing a slave-catcher while defending himself against an unprovoked attack as he searched for food in the dark of night. But his silence is broken when his thirst for knowledge is quenched by his master’s wife Elizabeth (Penelope Ann Miller).

Though presented with a library of books “for white folk” which are “full of things your kind won’t understand”, he is only given access to a “special book” in the bible, which he is assured if he “studies hard” will nourish his soul and change his life forever. Indeed it did, but not in the manner she envisaged. For after witnessing three decades of cruelty by the white man over the black, he draws upon scripture to spearhead a bloody insurrection, which as the title suggests leads to the birth of his nation through the American Civil War.

Debut director, writer and actor Nate Parker does a Meatloaf in that: Two out of three ain’t bad. As a performer he is excellent, portraying complex and varied emotions of disgust, anger, resentment, joy, sorrow, bitterness and ruthless determination with great subtlety and conviction. On the direction front, he draws out similarly nuanced performances from his impressive ensemble, which includes Aja Naomi King as his wife Cherry and Armie Hammer as his master’s son Samuel. But the writing is below par.

Much of the first hour passes like a Mills and Boons romance: the consummation of Nat’s marriage marked with an above-the-waists shot of the naked newlyweds gazing forlornly into one another’s eyes as a heart-shaped candle infuses proceedings with an angelic glow. To paraphrase Johnny Mathis: Then a child is born. Bar the final ten minutes, the pace is glacial and the dramatic tension is as flat and dry as a Virginia plain. And the score by Steven Rosenblum doesn’t so much gild the lily as coat it in 24 karat gold and hang it in Donald Trump’s opulent penthouse.

That said, a couple of scenes stand out: a close-up of a young black boy hanging from a tree, which slowly zooms out to reveal a dozen or so victims “swinging in the southern breeze” as Nina Simone sends a shiver down our spines with a soulful rendition of Abel Meeropol’s protest poem-turned-song Strange Fruit; the second, a harrowing encounter between a violent master and a shackled slave on hunger strike in which the former extracts the latter’s teeth with a hammer and chisel and then force-feeds him gruel through a funnel.

But as harrowing as the subject matter is and as terrific as Nate Parker’s performance is, we’ve seen it all before and done better in Steve McQueen’s adaptation of Solomon Northup’s memoir of the same name 12 Years A Slave, which won four Oscars including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. Still, the phrase “lest we forget” springs to mind. And the more we can educate ourselves and future generations about injustices of the past, the more likely we are to challenge racism and promote Nat Turner’s belief that everyone – regardless of race, creed or colour – has “got a right to the tree of life”.

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Peter Callaghan
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