Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at last year’s Sundance Film Festival and immediately leapt to the forefront of everyone’s 2016 Oscar predictions. By August, however, those hopes were dashed when news stories began circulating about the 1999 rape of an 18-year-old girl at Penn State for which the then-19-year-old Parker was exonerated, but his writing partner on The Birth of a Nation, Jean McGianni Celestin, was convicted. The story gained even more notoriety when it was revealed that the victim in the case suffered from mental problems for years thereafter and ended up taking her own life. Parker essentially became persona non-grata in Hollywood. But, as they say, “apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”
The film stands up quite well beside the monumental 1977 TV miniseries Roots and the 2013 Oscar winner 12 Years a Slave. There are, however, several historical inaccuracies that mar it. That shouldn’t be a detriment to a work of art as historical novels, plays, and films often play with the facts to fit the story. It wasn’t until 1995’s Braveheart that critics, both professional and non-professional, began to take a harsher view. In the case of The Birth of a Nation, the biggest flaw is in depicting Nat Turner (Parker), the literate slave and preacher who led the 1931 Virginia slave rebellion, as having lived his entire life as a slave on the Turner plantation. He is depicted as having grown up with Samuel Turner (Armie Hammer) who becomes his owner upon his father’s death. The Turner family, including Samuel, treats him as kindly as any owner treated a slave in the Antebellum South, which makes the climactic betrayals on both sides difficult to understand. What is left out is that Samuel Turner died in 1823 and Nat was sold to one owner while his wife and children were sold to another. That his new owner would not treat him with the same respect Samuel did, makes a lot more sense.
Another problem with the film is that it gives the impression that Turner’s rebellion planted the seeds for the Civil War, when in fact it was the nineteenth of twenty-four known slave rebellions that occurred between 1526 and 1859.
Plot reservations aside, this is a film that should be seen. It’s available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.
I wasn’t enthralled by the either the trailer or the plot outline of Gavin O’Connor’s The Accountant, but this turned out to be one of the year’s most underrated thrillers.
Ben Affleck gives his best performance to date as a freelance accountant, a math savant suffering from Asperger’s Syndrome, who is the subject of a Treasury Department manhunt. Nothing is as it seems as villains turn out to be heroes and heroes turn out to be villains with more coincidences than an Agatha Christie novel. J.K. Simmons as the treasury department head with a hidden agenda, Cynthia Addai-Robinson as his top investigator, Jeffrey Tambor as a prisoner under protection, John Lithgow and Jean Smart as robotics pioneers, Anna Kendrick as their accounting guru, and John Bernthal as the leader of a group of assassins all do excellent work. O’Connor (Warrior) has gone for years between films in the past but has three projects in various states of production now. I look forward to seeing them all.
The Accountant is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.
Mick Jackson’s Denial, with a screenplay from David Hare (The Hours), is a well-intentioned film about British vs. American libel laws and the denial of the Holocaust. The problem is it stretches a maybe ten-minute news story into a two-hour film with lots of filler. Add to that, the usually competent Rachel Weisz’s now-you-hear-it, now-you-don’t, atrocious Brooklyn account, and you have a film you can skip.
Matt Brown’s The Man Who Knew Infinitely is a nicely done biography of the great Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel), focusing on his time at Cambridge University under the guidance of G.H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons). Patel and Irons are at their best here in one of this year’s lesser-known films worth checking out.
Sean Ellis’s Anthropoid is the latest film about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s third-in-command, that was first dramatized in 1943’s dueling Hangmen Also Die and Hitler’s Madman. More accurate than its predecessors, the film is in two parts, the assassins’ (Cillian Murphy, Jamie Dornan) integration into Prague society, and the aftermath of the event. This is another of the year’s lesser-known films worth checking out.
Denial, The Man Who Knew Infinity, and Anthropoid are all available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.
Making their debut as Blu-ray upgrades are His Girl Friday, Battleground, David and Bathsheba, and Dead of Winter, all of which are worth checking out for different reasons.
The big surprise here is the restored original pre-code release of Lewis Milestone’s 1931 film of The Front Page starring Adolphe Menjou and Pat O’Brien, which Howard Hawks later turned on its head as 1940’s His Girl Friday with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in O’Brien’s role. It’s included as an extra on Criterion’s release of His Girl Friday and features the play’s immortal closing line, “the son of a bitch stole my watch,” which had been excised from the film once the Production Code went into effect.
William A. Wellman’s 1949 film, Battlegound, was, at the time of its release, considered the most realistic of the films about the World War II foot-soldier. It still holds up even if it has since been eclipsed by the likes of Patton and Saving Private Ryan.
I first saw Henry King’s 1951 biblical epic, David and Bathsheba, as a teenager and didn’t care for it, but seeing it now, Philip Dunne’s literate screenplay, Leo Shamroy’s beautiful cinematography, and Alfred Newman’s magnetic score make it worth watching even if Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward, though both good, are not at their greatest.
Arthur Penn’s 1987 thriller, Dead of Winter is hardly top-tier Penn, but it does give us Mary Steenburgen having a field day chewing the scenery in three roles as evil twins and the look-alike actress who is hired to impersonate one of them. Roddy McDowall, Jan Rubes, and William Russ co-star. Included in the Shout Factory release is a lengthy recent on-screen interview with the delightful Steenburgen on the making of the film and her career in general.
This week’s new releases include The Girl on the Train and the Blu-ray release of Bad Day at Black Rock.
