Urgent, Masterly, and Misbegotten
Fine technique, no measure to narrative on white supremacy
BY STEVE ERICKSON
Ever see a movie so “wellmade”
and “beautiful” it
becomes suffocating?
Gerard Bush and
Christopher Renz’s “Antebellum”
attempts to show the persistence
of slavery in modern-day America.
But it does so through a gimmicky
narrative, divided so carefully into
three acts that it would embarrass
a screenwriting teacher. Without
spoilers, the fi lm contains a twist
that’s neither clever nor original.
(Octavia Butler’s novel “Kindred,”
Haile Gerima’s fi lm “Sankofa” and,
more generally, “The Twilight Zone”
are obvious infl uences.) Bush and
Renz’s background lies in “social
justice”-minded commercial work.
They tried to make a genre fi lm
with the same mindset and have
fallen fl at on their faces.
“Antebellum” starts with a very
long, gliding Steadicam shot that
takes us from the exterior of a
Southern plantation to its depths,
where Black people are being
beaten, over the course of several
minutes. Although editing trickery
has obviously been used to conceal
cuts, the choreography that
must have gone into setting up the
shot is impressive. Bush and Renz
have an incredible eye for framing.
One scene manages to echo “Gone
with the Wind,” Nazi marches in
1930s Germany, and the 2017 rally
in Charlottesville, Virginia all at
once. The problem with “Antebellum”
is that the fi lmmakers never
pass up an opportunity to remind
the spectator how skilled they are,
even in situations where it’s wildly
inappropriate.
Eden (pansexual singer Janelle
Monáe) toils on a plantation while
the Civil War is taking place. Having
just been recaptured after an
escape account, she’s stoic and
numb. She spends her days picking
cotton under the supervision
of Captain Jasper (Jack Huston),
while the factory owner, simply
called Him (Eric Lange), tortures
her in an early scene and frequently
rapes her at night. But
then Eden wakes up and transforms
STREAMING CINEMA
Janelle Monáe is superb in Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s beautifully produced but ultimately unsuccessful “Antebellum.”
into Veronica (also played
by Monáe), a wealthy and successful
writer in present-day America.
Were Eden’s experiences simply
Virginia’s nightmare?
While still a fi lm critic for Cahiers
du Cinéma, Jacques Rivette
wrote an essay attacking Gillo
Pontecorvo’s 1960 concentration
camp-set “Kapo” for aestheticizing
such conditions with a zoom that
moved in to reframe its heroine’s
corpse. If Rivette were still alive, he
would recognize the same ethos at
play in “Antebellum” and walk out
after 15 minutes. When Eden is
branded, the camera moves closer
to catch her pain and then backs
away slightly. The fi lm then serves
us a “painterly” vista, with her
slave owner riding off as the moon
glows invitingly in the upper right
of the screen.
Bush and Renz have a gift for visual
style on the most basic level,
but no idea when it might be inappropriate.
One can tell that they’re
trying to parody the look of “Gone
with the Wind” at times, but much
of “Antebellum” feels like a cinematographer’s
demo reel.
It’d be putting it kindly to say
their script is heavy-handed. Promoting
her book “Shedding the
Coping Persona,” Virginia lectures
an audience of Black women about
“liberation, not assimilation” in a
scene that plays like a TED talk.
Back on the plantation, a mustachioed,
thickly accented man tells
a line of Black girls that they can’t
speak until spoken to by whites
and, for extra creepy affect, grabs
the cheek of one girl.
A few neat touches refl ect the
long-lasting impact of slavery and
white supremacist ideology: Virginia
stays in her hotel’s Jefferson
Suite, but strides through an airport
lobby in colorful African-infl uenced
clothes while everyone else
is dressed in dark suits. Monáe’s
performance is superb, taking her
character from beaten-down pain
to hard-won pride to desperate violence
while maintaining a throughline
at all times. But the directors
are terrible at pacing. The middle
third feels padded. The camera circles
endlessly around Virginia and
her friends for no apparent reason
as they eat dinner.
The problem with “Antebellum”
isn’t that it was made by a white
LIONSGATE
person who’s distant from the real
pain and oppression it depicts.
Bush and Renz are an interracial
gay couple; Bush is Black. But its
sensibility is closer to a ‘70s Bmovie
than “Get Out,” although its
publicity materials proudly trumpet
the fact that its production
company QC also worked out on
that fi lm. (Had Jordan Peele had
any input into “Antebellum,” it likely
would have turned out better.)
Its pretense of depicting the overlap
between America’s racist past
and present feels dishonest when
it leads to an action movie about
a slave revolt that isn’t nearly as
good as “Django Unchained,” followed
by the reveal of its gimmick.
The fi nal image before the closing
credits of “Antebellum” reminds
us how America has covered up its
tragic history by turning it into entertainment.
Is this fi lm self-aware enough
to realize it’s part of that process
too?
ANTEBELLUM | Directed by Gerard
Bush and Christopher Renz |
Lionsgate | Starts streaming Sept.
17 | lionsgate.com/movies
GayCityNews.com | September 10 - September 23, 2020 29
/movies
/GayCityNews.com
