Nat Turner's story hits the screen

Nate Parker's Birth of a Nation strikes a powerful chord.

After a smashing debut at last year's Sundance Film Festival, director Nate Parker's Birth of a Nation sold to Fox Searchlight for a record $17.5 million. Although the reviews weren't uniformly positive, the movie -- which tells the story of the 1831 slave revolt led by Nat Turner -- seemed the perfect antidote to a year that began with a mixture of commentary and protest about the inescapable whiteness of the Academy Awards.

A prestigious rollout seemed certain, and then news surfaced about a rape allegation dating back to Parker's college days at Penn State. Although he was acquitted, Parker was forced to address questions about himself rather than about his movie.

The tragedy of all this has less to do with the impact on Parker's reputation than with the possibility that news about Parker's personal history will in some way relieve audiences of responsibility for acknowledging the painful chapter of American history that the film depicts.

This is not to say that Birth of a Nation is masterpiece, but that it is a film that should be part of an important discussion. The movie's achievement not only involves the power of its story, but the way in which Parker brings us close to his characters.

In Parker's hands -- at least most of the time -- Turner is less a symbol of the fight against injustice than a living, breathing man with hopes, aspirations and a deep love for both his mother and the woman who would become his wife. He is man before he's a rebel.

Birth of a Nation underscores the humanity of those who were ravaged, but it also exposes the institutional structure that made such exploitation possible. If that's not an entirely new revelation, it bears repeating.

In telling early imagery, we see young Nat playing with the son of the white plantation owner. Their childhood friendship seems free-flowing and genuine, but we know it won't last because the white boy will grow up to "own" Nat Turner.

We quickly learn that young Nat was an exceptional child. He could read at an early age. As a result, the mistress of the Southampton, Va., plantation where Turner was enslaved (Penelope Ann Miller encouraged Nat's development. She instructed the youngster to steep himself in the Bible, the only book she deemed suitable for a person of his race.

When Turner matured, he became a preacher who offered solace to his fellow sufferers; he also offered a means for the owner of the by-then-faltering plantation (Armie Hammer) to enrich himself.

At the suggestion of a white preacher, Hammer's Samuel Turner "rented'' Nat to others as a kind of novelty, a black preacher who could convince the enslaved that a better world awaited them in the next life. The white hope was that those who were enslaved would put aside any notions of a better life in this go-round.

Played by Parker with a watchful gaze, Turner learns to negotiate plantation perils. At one point, he persuades Hammer's Samuel Turner to purchase a teen-age slave that had caught his eye. Cherry (Aja Naomi King) later becomes Nat's wife, a relationship the movie makes clear was held in little respect by many slavehoders.

Of course, the movie must show the brutalities that led to Nat Turner's revolt. These include rapes of black women, a horrible attack on a black slave who goes on a hunger strike and many other indignities.

Hammer's Samuel is depicted as one of the kinder slave holders, but even he can't resist a vigorous defense of the status quo when he learns that Nat has baptized a white man, an act considered scandalous.

Nat receives a severe whipping for bringing a white man to faith. Soon after, he rebels, leading his small band in a killing rampage that results in the deaths of some 55 whites.

Parker spares us some of the hard-core butchery of Turner's revolt, but gives us enough to suggest the level of fury that had been unleashed among those who had been so ceaselessly oppressed.

By the end, Parker can't resist sacralizing Turner's death. Turner was caught, hanged, and -- in this version of the story -- he triumphs over his cruel surroundings, presumably with a vision of divine justice that serves as both his vindication and an act of transcendence.

Third-act hagiography aside, the most most interesting achievement in the script by Parker and Jean McGianni Celestin* involves its depiction of the daily horrors of slavery.

Birth of a Nation takes its title from D.W. Griffith's silent, 1915 Civil War epic, a movie justly deemed racist for its demeaning depiction of blacks and for taking a lionizing approach to the Ku Klux Klan. The impacted ironies in Parker's choice of a title presumably were intended.

Following 12 Years A Slave, this Birth of a Nation adds to the small but significant list of movies that are trying to come to grips with a painful and shameful part of the American past.

As such, it's a powerful drama about a man driven by a burning faith that demanded that he call those who oppressed him into the severest of accounts.

I won't argue with those who choose not to see the movie because of Parker's personal history. I also won't argue with those who find fault with an imperfect movie. I will, however, argue with those who think that we don't need more movies that expose the evils of slavery. We do.

*Celestin, a roommate of Parker in college, initially was convicted of the rape charges, but the case was later dropped on appeal. I won't belabor a complicated story here. Look up Parker and Celestin, and you'll find no shortage of stories and commentaries about what has become a topic of national conversation about sexual assaults on campus.

A show business cautionary tale

Gugu Mbatha-Raw finds a star vehicle in Beyond the Lights.

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Director Gina Prince-Bythewood's Beyond the Lights mistakenly, I think, tries to pack a lot of issues into an essentially small frame: It's a fairy tale romance, a show-business cautionary tale and a look at how black women are marketed and sold by a sexually-obsessed music business.

Beyond the Lights isn't void of entertainment value -- and that may be part of its problem: It misses too many opportunites to dig deeply.

The movie focuses on the career of fictional pop star Noni -- played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, last seen in the historical drama Belle.

A British-born singer, Noni achieved her American breakthrough after teaming with a white American rapper named Kid Culprit (Colson "Machine Gun Kelly" Baker).

Not surprisingly, success hasn't brought Noni happiness. She's alienated from her authentic self, and pushed toward commercialism by her aggressively driven stage mother (Minnie Driver).

The movie sets the parameters of Noni's problem in an economical prologue. A young Noni (India Jean Jacques) participates in a talent contest in which she sings an a cappella version of Nina Simone's Blackbird.

Simone, the jazz singer who died in 2003, can be taken as the antithesis of a show-business sell-out.

An obvious victim of discrimination, Noni nabs second place. Not good enough, says Noni's oblivious white Mom, who -- in a pre-contest scene -- begs a black beautician for help with Noni's hair.

The movie then leaps into the present. Now a celebrity, a despairing Noni -- suffocating under a ton of exploitative packaging -- decides to leap from the balcony of her Los Angeles hotel room.

She's pulled back by a hunky LA cop (Nate Parker), who assures her that he sees past the razzle-dazzle. He knows who she is.

Although both Mbatha-Raw and Parker are compelling actors, I found it difficult to believe in their story-book romance.

Moreover, attempts to parallel Parker's story with Noni's throw the movie off course: He's a cop pushed toward politics by his father (Danny Glover). He, too, needs to reconnect with his real self.

There's also something inherently problematic about Prince-Bythewood's approach. It's not easy to show a hyper-sexualized Noni without feeding off some of the same energy that's being criticized.

Prince-Bythewood (Love and Basketball) obtains a star-making performance from Mbatha-Raw, but it's tethered to an uninspired romance and to a movie that tries to offer the satisfaction of a familiar story arc along with fresh insights into celebrity, particularly as it concerns black women.

Perhaps because of its fractured ambitions, this movie about the need for Noni to find her real voice doesn't always feel as if it has found one of its own.

A tense, well-acted 'Arbitrage'

Robert Miller has a lovely wife and two grown children who work for him at his wildly successful hedge fund. As befits a man of great wealth, Miller and his wife give major money to charity, and he's regarded as a Wall Street wizard, a guy who hits way more than he misses.

But Robert -- Richard Gere in a performance that's smart and icy -- may not be anyone's idea of a role model. He has a mistress (Laetitia Casta), and he's in the midst of carrying out a fraud, a $412-million scheme designed to fool auditors who are evaluating his company for a possible merger.

Robert desperately wants the merger to succeed, which means he's walking a financial tightrope. He hopes he can close the deal before he faces exposure and ruin.

Despite the movie's initial appearance, writer/director Nicholas Jarecki isn't necessarily out to make a major statement about financial corruption, something, say, on the order of last year's Margin Call.

First and foremost, Jarekci cranks up a thriller that has Robert trying to cover up another crime, a task that involves him with a young black man (Nate Parker) who owes him a favor and helps carry out the deception.

This part of the movie introduces a determined cop (Tim Roth) who spends most of the movie trying to prove Robert's guilt. If things threaten to get dull, an amusing Roth's around to pose questions that seem to annoy everyone with whom he talks.

Adding a second criminal element to the financial deception has a dual effect: It keeps the movie from bogging down in complex wheeling and dealing (good), but it also prevents Jarecki from making a strong enough statement about a financial system in which unethical and illegal behavior seems to be tolerated -- so long as no one gets caught.

Jarecki has a lot on his plate, but he mostly weaves the movie's many threads into a brisk and coherent thriller that features a variety of strong performances. Among them: Susan Sarandon portrays Robert's wife, a woman who may know more than she lets on. Brit Marling plays the daughter who works for and idolizes her father, and who provides the movie with a character who experiences morally based doubt.

About three-quarters of the way through, I began to wonder how Jarecki would join the movie's many plot lines, and I can't say I found his resolution entirely satisfying, but there's enough crackle, intrigue and pleasure (smart guys trying to outsmart one another) in Arbitrage to keep it percolating nicely.