Rise Up: THE BIRTH OF A NATION

A straightforward reenactment of Nat Turner leading a slave uprising in 1831 could make for a great movie. It hasn’t yet, but I hope someone will get it right. The one great film about Turner, Charles Burnett’s Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, is a documentary interested in how little we can truly know about the man, due to the fact that so much of his record has been muddied, falsified, exaggerated, and expunged over the years. We know plenty about the white people he and his rebels killed. The slaves doing the killing, however, remain in many ways unknowable. Turner lives on as a complicated, ambiguous figure, heroic for fighting back, condemned for the brutality and totality of his tactics. Women and children were slaughtered, but so, too, did slavery butcher and brutalize a people. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but then again there’s nothing right about letting a wrong go on unimpeded. These are richly complicated ideas, but Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation simplifies and uncomplicates it in its telling.

Parker wants to make a big statement. The actor clearly has passion in the project, taking it as his subject for his debut as writer-director. It’s his Dances with Wolves, his Braveheart, a way to throw his Hollywood clout behind a picture built to flatter his own ego while making a big, broad period piece about racial injustice. You certainly can’t doubt that he’s thinking about making a dramatic statement, to shine a light on a moment in our nation’s history that’s too often ignored or consigned to a footnote in textbooks. His determination to right a wrong extends to the title, elbowing D.W. Griffith’s landmark 1915 film of the same name – a stirring Civil War epic that concludes in lengthy sequences of appalling black stereotypes and the KKK riding to the rescue – into sharing the spotlight with a tale more accurate and attuned to the moral arc of time. There’s little avoiding our current political climate in scenes of slobbering white men demanding slaves’ papers even when they have no reason to suspect them of a violation, in unarmed black men gunned down by people who feel justified in their control over and fear of their bodies.

But it’s no surprise that a movie about American slavery would be so harrowing and upsetting in dealing with sensitive and traumatizing material. What is surprising is how Parker brings so little illumination to his subject, trusting his audience to bring the loaded contemporaneous associations and historical context into the theater with them. He glosses past Turner’s upbringing, a young slave boy allowed to read because of his interest in the Bible, who then becomes a preacher rented out to other plantations in order to keep their slaves docile through the opiate of twisted scripture. It’s told in obvious gestures and borrowed imagery, as if he figured we’d seen 12 Years a Slave and Roots and the rest so he could let it play out in shorthand and stock types. But unlike those other, better works – and the many others besides – Parker’s tale isn’t interested in deepening our understanding or complicating our assumptions or peeking into the lived experience of the institution. He’s too interested in flattering himself as a performer – giving him tearful reactions to traumas others are dealing with, and providing opportunities for grand speeches and inspiring low-angle shots – to allow anyone in the talented ensemble (Dwight Henry, Roger Guenveur Smith, Gabrielle Union...) to make more than fleeting impressions.

Shooting it all in a pale blue digital glow which softens even the harshest violence, Parker simplifies and streamlines the narrative, to the detriment of his larger goals. It’s a fascinating story of Christian scripture as a double-edged sword, the preacher teaching the slavers’ self-serving self-justification version of bondage and freedom before turning and using the fire and brimstone of righteous anger to foment a rebellion. But Parker makes Turner’s story into simple Chosen One willpower – complete with mystical prophecy, cloudy visions, and an angelic symbol – and easy morality. He’s upset by what he sees, but is finally jolted to action because of an attack on his wife (Aja Naomi King), a woman reduced to a prop, her suffering the literal background of his story. Then, in the revolt itself, the real facts of the case – indiscriminate murder, followed by indiscriminate reprisals – are glossed over to create a more convenient tone of uncomplicated tragic martyrdom and comfortable retribution. The nice white people live. The ones who start nice but grow mean are attacked off screen. The worst of the whites (like Jackie Earle Haley, who does most of the worst) die slow, bloody deaths on screen as if it’s only a simple matter of revenge instead of also an attack on an institution.

This leaves the movie too often looking away, not digging into the nastiness and moral complications of the surrounding context. Its beginning is evocative, Turner silhouetted against a stained-glass window while his master (Armie Hammer) bleeds out. Its aftermath is powerful: a long, slow pull back to reveal body after body lynched, hanging in a tree while “Strange Fruit” anachronistically appears on the soundtrack. But after the sluggish build up, the central event is too indifferently staged and over before you know it. We came to see a story about a man, but he’s blandly developed. We came to see an uprising, an attempt to spark a Civil War that ended in horrible defeat. And then it, too, is used for the least effect it could have. The events within The Birth of a Nation are inherently powerful, and kick up provocative and complicated questions. But the movie itself does too little with this powder keg on which it sits. To the extent it’s interesting it’s in spite of itself, not because. The events that should be shocking feel routine, and no character emerges as fully humanized, not even the Turner who is so scrubbed of all complications even as he draws all focus. Talk about a missed opportunity.

Love & Fame: BEYOND THE LIGHTS

More than anything, Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Beyond the Lights is a great romance. It’s not like we get a new one of those everyday. It’s about two people who make a meaningful connection, seeing the real souls behind images being constructed for them in the beginning stages of public personas, one a pop star, the other a politician. In the process of following their connection, the film weaves together showbiz drama and political ambitions to make a fine point about negotiations between public and private selves, and potential solace in finding a person who seems to love you for who you are, not just what you represent. It’s a sharply drawn, deeply felt story, as smart as it is sexy, as complicated as it is compassionate. It helps that it’s not a romantic fantasy, or rather, not only fantasy.

They meet at a moment of high drama. She’s Noni (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), an R&B diva on the rise. She hasn’t even released her first album yet, but she’s come a long way from getting second place in local talent competitions of her childhood, like the one that opens the film. Collaborations on hit songs – we see the video for one, a writhing, hyper-sexualized thing – with dim bulb rapper Kid Culprit (Richard Colson Baker) have just won her a Billboard Music Award. Everything’s looking up, but after the afterparty, when the handsome young cop (Nate Parker) bursts into her hotel room, she’s about to jump off the balcony. He saves her life, and her grateful stage mom manager (Minnie Driver in an intense performance) convinces him to tell everyone she merely slipped. The world knowing about the suicide attempt could really derail her rising star.

A more sensationalistic writer-director might take these early scenes as a launching pad for increasing stakes and twists. Instead, the film settles into a comfortable exploration of these characters. The actors provide nicely layered performances, able to play multifaceted people with ease. Noni is grateful for her hero cop’s help, and he’s drawn to her glimmer of personality hiding under half-dressed magazine-cover poses and hip-shaking choreography. They start a flirtation that becomes a tentative relationship, hounded at every turn by the gossip press and the dictates of their parents. Her mother wants to make sure her daughter's album drops flawlessly, and doesn’t want the new beau reminding the public about the incident. His father, the chief of police (Danny Glover), is helping his son prepare a run for city council, taking meetings with donors, consultants, party leaders. He has big dreams for his son, at one point telling him Noni isn’t “first lady material.”

This perspective makes the couple into rounded, complex people instead of cogs in a machine running on cheap dramatics. There isn’t a sense of inevitability because it’s grounded where the average Nicolas Sparks adaptation prefers sun-dappled fantasy. We understand where the characters are coming from, the goals they’ve worked so hard to achieve. It makes their connection all the more potent, to know what makes them tick apart from the spark between them. Too many movie romances rush this part, defining the central couple largely by how they interact with each other. This is a melodrama that earns its every tug on the heartstrings. The film is balanced, allowing us to see the surface allure that draws each in. He sees the glamour and fame of her lifestyle. She sees him as the square-jawed hero. But we also see how fragile a manufactured star she is, as well as the workaday cop duties and pragmatic political calculations he must consider.

With fine, realistic detail, we come to understand how the world works in their bubbles, what dictates the controls over their lives, and what difficulties may arise reconciling the two. These are characters whose ambitions are boxing them in, who let in some fresh air by finding a romantic spirit in an unexpected place, even at the risk of derailing their perfect plans for public life. There’s not a scene out of place as the film develops their lives and personalities separately and together. Parker’s dazed but encouraging presence is a nice match to the stifled insecurities Mbatha-Raw brings to the fore as we see glossy awards shows, photoshoots, and meetings with record labels contrasted with police calls and meet-and-greets. They’re both clad in uniforms. Hers are clinging dresses draped in chains, plunging necklines, and her straight purple hair. His are more literal, a police uniform, sharp suits. When they’re together, they’re more casual, relaxed, themselves. The wardrobes draw off-handed focus to their bodies, a sensuality that amplifies the comfort they increasingly feel towards each other.

The evolution of their relationship is so closely observed, wonderfully performed by the talented cast, and precisely developed by writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood. It’s not a film that declares itself loudly, but is so confident in its characters and perspective that it grabbed me in the opening frames and never let go. It’s the rare romance movie in which I actually was completely involved in the couple’s plight, desperate for them to find a way to be together. Their individual plotlines are finely detailed, with great scenes apart from one another, the better to make their scenes together sizzle with easy chemistry and swooning charm. It’s a great romance because it’s a good story with interesting characters. It would work as drama even without the romance, about the intimacy, not only between lovers, but collaborators, business partners, and parents and children as well. It has scenes that unfold with such simplicity and restraint, I found myself taken aback by how moved I was.

Prince-Bythewood is a major, often vastly underappreciated, voice in American cinema. With heartfelt romances like Love & Basketball and Disappearing Acts, and an appealing literary adaptation, The Secret Life of Bees, she’s proven herself a subtle and mature filmmaker. Her camera doesn’t call attention to itself. Her filmmaking craft is the stuff of sturdy, expert studio construction. But that invisible skill, no less effective than a more showboating style, allows her every frame to exude a well-considered eye for emotional terrains. With Beyond the Lights, she continues to be one of the last great Hollywood melodramatists. She’s unafraid to earnestly and tenderly tell stories of relationships without apology. This is her best film, a full, stick-to-the-ribs, heartwarming drama, rich with feeling.

Here we have a beautifully told story of human connection struggling to catch fire in a world that craves only shallow fakery and transactional relationships. It’s genuinely affecting, with larger themes, most potently about the way women are treated in the entertainment business, growing naturally out of who the characters are, why they make certain choices, and what they need from each other. This isn’t an uncomplicated love-conquers-all scenario with perfect soul mates healing each other. No, this is a mature and complicatedly nuanced story that earns its every moment of drama. Because it gives us something to care about beyond the relationship, it heightens the potency of the romance. It could’ve easily been maudlin in its relationship, scolding in its look at the entertainment business. But it’s not. The script has a sympathetic and subtle understanding of love, fame, depression, and self-actualization. It’s simply clear-eyed, genuine, and moving.

Can't Stop, Won't Stop: NON-STOP

In 2005 and 2006, we had a small post-9/11 glut of thrillers set on airplanes, all largely excellent in one way (United 93) or another (Red Eye, Flightplan), or another (Snakes on a Plane). It’s a subgenre I’m happy to return to yet again in Non-Stop, especially when it’s done well, and even better, when we’re seated next to Liam Neeson. He has such likable, intimidating intelligence on screen. Using his height, his gravely accent, and his piercing eyes to communicate a soulful determination and confident capacity for handling any situation in which he finds himself, he anchors and makes compelling even the junkiest of thrillers, like Taken 2. For very good thrillers, like The Grey, he helps make them into terrific suspenseful evocations of existential anguish. Non-Stop’s entertainment value falls somewhere between those previous pictures. It’s a relentless entertainment that constantly tightens the situation around Neeson, constraining options and narrowing his ability to maneuver until the panic reaches a crowd-pleasing intensity.

In this slow boil thriller of slickly increasing and enjoyable suspense, he plays an air marshal aboard a late night transatlantic flight from New York to London. Not long after takeoff, he receives a series of texts from a blocked number. Each new message flashes on the screen, the silence of the midnight flight turning ominous as the texts reveal an ultimatum. A passenger will be killed every 20 minutes unless $150 million is transferred to a specified account. It’s a hostage situation, but only the marshal knows, at least at first. Who is the hostage taker? It’s someone on the plane, but he or she is doing an awfully good job staying hidden. (Could this be the first organic and well-executed use of texting for the purposes of cinematic anxiety?) Director Jaume Collet-Serra, of the skillfully upsetting horror film Orphan and the Neeson-starring actioner Unknown, uses the darkened nighttime interior of the plane to heighten the drama and keep the stakes intensely enclosed.

A cleverly contained mystery, the film is smartly not a whodunit, but a who-is-doing-it. Any one of the people hunched over their tablets and smart phones could be doing the threatening. It’s a high-flying locked room mystery, Agatha Christie by way of Speed. The screenplay by John W. Richardson, Chris Roach, and Ryan Engle respects the audience’s intelligence as it follows Neeson looking around the plane, hunting for anything suspicious. The appealing ensemble is loaded with familiar faces playing passengers (Julianne Moore, Scoot McNairy, Nate Parker, Corey Stoll, Omar Metwally), flight attendants (Michelle Dockery, Lupita Nyong’o), and airline officials (Anson Mount). All of them can ably appear suspicious and innocent in the same instant. Neeson is desperately searching amongst and around them for a clue when events suddenly conspire for a corpse to turn up exactly on schedule. The threats are no mere prank. They are deadly serious.

As events on the plane grow increasingly desperate, curiosity escalates in the passengers and crew. Information and rumors spill out in dribs and drabs of context-free worry, eventually making their way to the ground where authorities, like Shea Whigham in a good voice performance as a security official calling the plane’s phone, and news media assume Neeson is the one doing the hostage-taking . That only makes solving the case harder for the poor guy. It’s a credit to the inexorable forward momentum of the film and the welcome shades of complexity to this Hitchcockian wrong-man panic that I found myself desperately wanting Neeson to be right, but half-prepared for a twist that would put him in the wrong. It sure looks like he’s being framed, but in this situation everyone is a suspect. The plane keeps cutting through the night sky, too far to turn back to America, still too far away from Europe to make a landing. But as the threat of violence looms, casualties slowly pile up, and Neeson’s behavior grows increasingly desperate, it’s agonizingly clear they’re eventually heading to the ground one way or another.

Non-Stop stays at a consistent height of peril, compelling and involving throughout. Neeson grounds it all with a weary humanity as an alcoholic ex-cop with sad family problems, a token amount of backstory that would seem cheap if a lesser actor was in his position. He reluctantly finds himself the center of this madness, and the one with the best chance of bringing it to a safe conclusion. Collet-Serra makes great use of Neeson’s height and broad shoulders in contrast to the tight aisles and low ceilings of the setting, finding ways to use every bit of the plane in clever ways, even sending the vehicle into sudden turbulence to punctuate dramatic moments. The raw material is nothing inherently special, but in its execution it rises to the level of superior craftsmanship. It is a solid, exciting, and satisfying thriller.

Quick Looks: ARBITRAGE, THE GOOD DOCTOR, and SLEEPWALK WITH ME

In Arbitrage, Richard Gere plays a hugely wealthy banker in some serious trouble. He’s become embroiled in a complicated financial deal that’s threatening to sink his company if the funds don’t get moved around quickly enough to cover his assets. And that’s not even the worst of it. He sneaks away from his wife (Susan Sarandon) to drive upstate with his mistress (Laetitia Casta) and ends up flipping the car. When he comes to, he sees that his mistress is dead in the passenger seat so he flees the scene of the accident. (The pointed intent couldn’t be clearer: the rich flee catastrophe on instinct.) So he’s dealing with financial trouble and legal trouble, skulking around large boardrooms, spacious offices, and fancy apartments, trying to avoid the consequences of his actions.

Writer-director Nicholas Jarecki has created a phony fantasy of a character study that feels altogether too calculated a guesstimate of how the one-percent lives. (Not that I have any experience with that income bracket, but it can’t be as simple as it’s made to seem here.) To put such material in a standard thriller (the kind with dramatic turns that make it play like an episode of Law & Order from the suspect’s point-of-view) only cheapens what was sparsely drawn to begin with. It should be juicier and with more of a bite; it’s all strangely toothless. That said, Gere gives a persuasive performance of a man crumbling under the burden of keeping up appearances. I also appreciated the work of Nate Parker, as a working-class man Gere debates scapegoating, and Tim Roth, as the investigator who is frustrated that the legal system seems rigged in favor the rich. Would that these performances were in a movie that would be able to better show them off.

Director Lance Daly’s The Good Doctor is a squirmy thriller about a lonely young doctor (Orlando Bloom) who falls in love (no, obsession) with a pretty patient (Riley Keough). He decides to tweak her medication in order to keep her in the hospital under his care. The script by John Enborn follows this situation to its predictable conclusion and the talented supporting cast (including Taraji P. Henson, Michael Peña, and J.K. Simmons) fills out the plot convincingly enough. It’s a shame, then, that the whole experience is just a sad, slow circle down the drain, completely without tension and devoid of emotional interest. This is a thinly imagined thriller that manages nothing more than a queasy feeling once or twice. It’s most unfulfilling in its flat visual style and ploddingly obvious script. As someone who sort of enjoyed Daly’s similarly slight first feature, the kids-in-puppy-love romance Kisses, I’m especially disappointed to see that this is where he’s gone next. He’s a director of potential and maybe someday he’ll live up to it.

Stand-up comedian Mike Birbiglia has told the same – very funny – story in several mediums now. If you’re anything like me, you may have managed to hear several times over (in his stand-up, on This American Life, in his memoir) about his intense sleepwalking problem that caused him to, say, dream about a jackal intruding in his bedroom, which would result in him fast asleep shouting at a hamper, fully convinced he was confronting a wild animal. This is obviously a problem, but his career seemed to be taking off and his relationship with his girlfriend was growing complicated and one thing leads to another and he’s in a deep sleep while jumping out a second-story hotel window.

This story’s latest telling takes movie form in Sleepwalk with Me and it’s perfectly fine, though I did wonder if it would have worked better on me if the novelty was still there. Birbiglia, here the writer, director and star, has a loose, casual style that pumps up dream sequences with off-hand discombobulation that is undercut with silly shifts to reality. To fill out the rest of the semi-autobiographical movie, it follows Birbiglia’s relationship with his girlfriend (played by Lauren Ambrose) as well as his growing stand-up career that takes him from hotel to hotel, crummy gig to crummy gig. Altogether it plays like Woody Allen lite, warm and sweetly small. This is a minor, but often charming movie, mostly because Birbiglia is so likable. But the thing of it is, you’d have just as good a time listening to the original monologue, so I have a hard time recommending this movie outright. 

Wings of Glory: RED TAILS

Red Tails is a creaky, rickety World War II movie. Those are hardly rare, but what makes this one especially disappointing is the way it dives headfirst into one aspect of the war that is too rarely considered and then finds nothing new to say about it, or even entertaining ways to say the old things. The film concerns itself with telling the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, an all black squadron of fighter pilots during a time in which the official policy of the United States Army was that African Americans were unfit for combat based on nothing more than the color of their skin.

The film starts with the Airmen flying mostly peaceful patrols far from the front lines. They’re not allowed in situations for which dogfights might be a necessity, which means they’re denied the chance to go wing-to-wing with German fighters. They’re getting antsy. We meet a handful of the pilots, our ensemble of protagonists, each with their own snappy nickname. There’s Easy (Nate Parker), Lightning (David Oyelowo), Ray Gun (Tristan Wilds), Winky (Leslie Odom Jr.), Neon (Kevin Phillips), Sticks (Cliff Smith), Smoky (Ne-Yo), and Deke (Marcus T. Paulk). They’re personalities more than characters, which is disappointing, but it’s the kind of surface-level American cross-section of types that comes with the middling WWII movie territory.

They’re good pilots. Some of them are even great pilots. We first meet them flying across the fields of Italy running a routine patrol. They’ve only blown up one little Nazi truck when they cross paths with an innocent-looking train that becomes a whole lot less innocent when Nazi anti-aircraft guns in the back car open fire. They dip down and manage to not only derail the train, but to blow it up as well. But it’s all so unsatisfying. How embarrassing to be simply “shooting traffic,” as one pilot grumbles. Their commanders agree. Through the commander of their base in Italy (Cuba Gooding Jr.) to a D.C. liaison (Terrence Howard), the Airmen make their case to the stubborn, prejudiced brass.

Following the true story insofar as it affords the potential for aerial combat, the script by John Ridley (with extra, unfortunately rather personality free work from Boondocks writer/creator Aaron McGruder) pounds half-heartedly through some flavorless cardboard drama on the ground to get these heroes from takeoff to takeoff. Everything between the landings seems tossed aside and half-hearted, conflicts between characters that bubble up in a line of dialogue and disappear entirely forgotten for large periods of time. It’s strange for a movie so thin to feel overstuffed but when a subplot that’s essentially a remake of The Great Escape involves only one character we’ve previously met and lasts all of two-and-a-half scenes, it’s hard to feel otherwise.

There’s rich story potential to be mined here, but the movie skips across the surface of deeper resonance on its way to find visceral heroics. A fair amount of the movie contains clichéd fighter pilot dialogue shouted over the roar of plane engines. Anthony Hemingway, who has directed a handful of episodes in several different recent series of note (including The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, and Community), is sitting in the director’s chair and, though he’s no good at figuring out how to outmaneuver the blockheaded clichés of the script, he’s certainly good at figuring out how to stay out of the way of the Industrial Light and Magic CGI battles in the sky. 

It’s here that the influence of producer George Lucas (who, to his credit, has tried out of his passion for this under-told story to get this film made for decades before finally financing it himself) is most clearly felt. The way these planes fly about shooting at each other, with routine fighter pilot patter howling over the roar of propellers and gunfire feels awfully reminiscent of X-Wings and TIE Fighters zapping at each other in the dark of space. It’s sad to say that those Star Wars space battles are significantly more thrilling than these based-on-a-true-story dogfights, but there you have it.

The film feels weirdly inconsequential with a storyline that zips off in too many directions to really make an impact. But the look of the film is a problem too. Shot on digital in a terrible use of the medium, the image is weirdly bright and artificial and entirely textureless. It’s naturally void of the nuance of film grain but without satisfactorily compensating for it by using the unique visual properties of digital a la the recent work of Michael Mann, David Fincher, and Steven Soderbergh (whose Haywire is probably playing the next auditorium over and definitely making far better use of digital camerawork).

I was rooting for this movie. It gives me no pleasure to write this. Walking out of the theater, my dissatisfaction made me sad. All the material was in place for a great fun throwback: a terrific story, a fine cast, and a great special effects company. But the filmmakers simply failed to crack the story’s difficulties. The film lacks shape and, though it’s oddly simple and perhaps perversely upbeat, it lacks the momentum and the visceral filmmaking power of the best war films. Truffaut once said that it was hard to make an anti-war film because war looks inherently exciting on film. Not this one. It tries its hardest, and succeeds from time to time, but the thing never coheres one way or the other, or at all.