What do we know for certain about the American actor, writer, director and producer Nate Parker?
That he is the driving force behind The Birth of a Nation, a movie about the Nat Turner slave rebellion, which emerged from the Sundance Festival last January with rave reviews, a record $17.5-million (U.S.) distribution deal from Fox Searchlight and pre-Oscar buzz.
And that, when he was 19, he was, at the very least, a Grade A jerk.
As the commercial opening of his movie approaches, Parker has begun talking about the circumstances in which he was tried for rape and acquitted after an incident during his college days at Penn State, 17 years ago. A young woman, who said she was unconscious at the time, accused Parker and his roommate Jean Celestin, who is now his co-writer on the film, of sexual assault. Parker was found not guilty in 2001; Celestin was found guilty, but successfully appealed the verdict and was not tried a second time because his accuser chose not to testify.
Parker has never made a secret of the case, but is presumably talking about it now to get out in front of the story before the film opens commercially Oct. 7 after screening at the Toronto International Film Festival next month.
It's not an easy conversation to control: The story got real legs this week when Variety discovered that Parker's accuser committed suicide in 2012. Parker responded with a sorrowful Facebook post, in which he restated his innocence but said he had little wisdom at the time and lamented the lack of empathy he had shown to his accuser. Her brother told Variety that Parker and Celestin had hounded her to the point she feared for her safety after she made the accusation.
TIFF's screening and Fox Searchlight's plans to give media access to Parker remain unchanged. Parker and Fox may still hope that if all this is aired now, then by October the conversation will have moved on and people will judge the movie instead of judging the man. Yes, when the film shows up here in September, critics should be evaluating his performance as Turner and his direction of the story about the 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia, rather than debating the details of a case in which Parker was acquitted or speculating on the reasons why a woman they don't know killed herself.
But making the argument that the artist's behaviour should not prejudice us against the art is much easier in the case of historical figures – it is sometimes used to dismiss Wagner's anti-Semitism and Picasso's misogyny – than it is in the case of contemporary celebrities beholden to a Hollywood system that continually uses their images, personalities and lives to sell the product. Parker may not be his movie, but he is its public voice.
In the end, audiences may not actually care about his behaviour at college and, quite frankly, are as likely to check out the movie because of controversy and publicity as they are to boycott it in disapproval. What will surely be affected is the movie's Oscar campaign.
As The Birth of a Nation emerged strongly from Sundance, it looked all set to neatly solve the #OscarSoWhite controversy for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Here it was, only January, 2016, and it was already clear that in a year's time there would be a least one strong African-American contender for nominations and awards. Everybody could breath a sigh of relief.
But now that path is anything but clear.
When the Academy members cast their votes, they are never exclusively recognizing artistic merit. They routinely vote for righteousness, too, picking art with which they agree – films such as Driving Miss Daisy, Dances with Wolves or Schindler's List.
A pre-Oscar publicity effort is both a popularity contest and a political campaign of sorts, and the notion that the film's subject is not as heroic as it might first appear can scupper the whole thing. The controversy over factual liberties taken by the script of The Hurricane, about the wrongfully convicted Hurricane Carter, is considered to have killed its Oscar chances in 1999 – and proved the need for a smart, pre-emptive Oscar strategy. The producers of Zero Dark Thirty may have followed that strategy in 2013, although that movie never overcame the suggestion it was nothing but CIA propaganda.
Individual artists have also been tarred by scandals completely unrelated to their movies: In 2002, Russell Crowe may have lost his Oscar for A Beautiful Mind to an incident in which he assaulted a London producer; this year, Charlotte Rampling of 45 Years didn't do her chances any good with comments suggesting the #OscarsSoWhite controversy was prejudiced against white people.
It's always easy to dismiss the Oscars as an over-hyped spectacle in which Hollywood picks the right dresses and the wrong movies, but it is an event of immense political and social importance in the United States. In a period of renewed racial tensions in that country, The Birth of a Nation might have provided a reconciliatory moment, an uplifting story of the nation unifying around an honest artistic depiction of its dark past while clearing up the award's own racial controversy. The Birth of a Nation may yet win nominations and Oscars, but Parker's own past guarantees that it will not be a simple story.
Kate Taylor