Antebellum (Dir. Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, 2020):
The increased prominence of African-American film over recent years has led to several happy outcomes, including a surge in the black horror genre. Historically doomed to supporting roles that usually resulted in getting offed in the first or second reel (with a few notable exceptions, like Ice Cube in Anaconda or LL Cool J in Deep Blue Sea), black actors and actresses are now the headliners, with Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us leading the way. Not only do these productions bring the jump scares, but they also inject knowing social commentary about what it means to be an African-American, past and present.
Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s Antebellum is all about the past and present; it leads off with a William Faulkner quote—”The past is never dead. It’s not even past”—that suggests that the terrors that lay ahead are very ancient, indeed, and the film’s opening confirms this view. A showy yet hypnotic tracking shot caresses the front yard of a genteel southern plantation at dusk, then snakes around back to where the real action (and atrocities) take place: slaves toiling away at the land, local Confederate soldiers executing runaways when they’re not branding and raping them, a tattered Dixie flag fluttering in the breeze. Photographed in tortuous slow motion by Pedro Luque, the sequence has a burnished glow that suggests the film is a prestige project, even as the story and characters retain the look and feel of pulp. The dastardly Confederates are smug (“We got those blue-bellied bastards on their heels, Washington in our sights”), the noble slaves suffer piteously, and a day of reckoning looms.
And then Bush and Renz (who also wrote the film) pull out the rug from under our feet: a slave named Eden (Janelle Monáe) falls asleep, then awakens as Veronica Henley, respected writer and PhD holder in American Constitutional History. The author of a book titled Shedding the Coping Persona, Veronica is a successful go-getter, but what’s the connection between this put-together, confident young woman of the modern day and the cowed, fearful Eden? The topic of a lecture she’s giving at an academic conference (“The Exorcism of the Unconscious Past”) might be a clue, and in case we didn’t get the hint, she further explains: “My nana used to say our ancestors haunt our dreams to see themselves forward.” Or how about this one: “The unresolved past can certainly wreak havoc on the present.”
Not that anything in Veronica’s present seems to contain any sort of havoc. Gifted with an understanding husband, a precocious kid and supportive friends, she’s the very picture of bourgeois contentment. When she’s not namaste-ing her way through the day with the help of her drippy yoga instructor, she’s debating the nutritional value of a non-vegan pancake, or pondering existential dilemmas that are the domain of the middle class (“I’m not mom enough, I’m not wife enough”). Nevertheless, Bush and Renz introduce notes of disquiet: a wealthy interviewer (Jenna Malone) who drips with disdain when she questions Veronica, and later sneaks into the writer’s hotel room to steal her lipstick; a black friend (Gabourey Sidibe) who’s keenly aware of every little microaggresson against her, and won’t take no sass when pointing them out. These tiny bits of business are like crumbs, barely nourishing us as we await something interesting to transpire.
But rather than introducing character-driven stakes, or drawing any metaphorical parallels between the traumatic racial past represented by Eden and the self-satisfied present embodied by Veronica, the movie decides to go literal, with a final-act turn that won’t be revealed here but won’t be that much of a surprise to most folks. Antebellum is pregnant with provocative imagery: a black woman branded and whipped, a black man in yoke and chains, evil soldiers who literally twirl their mustaches, a burning shed that conjures up visions of genocide. What it lacks is a message or theme to make sense of all these shock tactics. While a exploitation fanboy like Quentin Tarantino also goes over the top, he uses the trappings of his revisionist Westerns to cast a sympathetic eye on the black experience, and give his characters heft if not depth. Even HBO’s current TV series Lovecraft Country, problematic as it sometimes is, has a powerful objective buried inside the pulp: reclaiming 1950s African-American history in all its hopes and tragedies. The best Antebellum can offer is some mild narrative trickery, including eye-rolling payoffs for most of its set-ups (Veronica’s yoga training does indeed come in handy at a crucial moment). All the actors, especially Monáe, attack the material with gusto, but without a resonant sticking point, the film fails to stick the landing, devolving into thriller mechanics: a harrowing escape, a chase on horseback, one final surprise at the end that aims for “gotcha” and misses out on catharsis.
Antebellum has come under heavy fire by critics on all sides, who either decry the portrayal of Civil War history, or see the movie as another monument to white-bashing and #BlackLivesMatter. The truth is, for all its half-hearted nods towards a deeper historic truth and its musings about racial memory, Antebellum isn’t intelligent enough to merit (or deserve) those sorts of criticisms. Clever without being smart, it’s a grindhouse movie that tries to pass itself off as arthouse, cynically pulling us in with the promise of meaning, only to bonk us on the head with substance-free style.
