Antebellum (2020)

OCTOBER 30, 2020

GENRE: THRILLER
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

I have long been an advocate for going into a movie as blind as possible, feeling that knowing too much beforehand can dilute the experience by either informing you of things that should be part of the film's suspense (seeing a clearly rescued Tom Hanks in the Cast Away spots will forever annoy me) or giving you a false idea of what the movie is actually about. Then there are a few films where having a little background can actually help things; knowing that Cloud Atlas (hey, Hanks again!) unifies a general story across six timelines can help your brain settle into its unique rhythm much faster than someone who had no clue what they were in for, or that 2001 was eventually set in outer space will keep you from being confused when the apes open the film for an entire reel.

And then there's Antebellum.

At this point I'll have to warn you that there will be spoilers ahead, mainly because I feel I have no choice in the matter. The film is entirely based on a twist; the closest thing I can compare it to in that "we have to let you know what it's about even though it's treated as a surprise" sense is Cabin in the Woods. The two aren't necessarily alike in terms of plot, but both have that thing where if you tell someone the "simple" plot (in that case, five kids going into a cabin in the woods) they will rightfully say "Well I've seen that, what's the HOOK for this one in particular?", forcing you to tell them about Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins' roles in the proceedings to pique their interest. So if you absolutely want to go in blind - or feel your viewer skills aren't attuned enough to spot the twist early on (some folks admitted they didn't see it coming, for the record) - you should stop reading here.

For those of you who are still with me... OK, keeping in mind my Cabin in the Woods example, Antebellum is, on the surface, a movie about a woman on a plantation, struggling to perform her expected duties while trying to mount an escape. Nothing particularly wrong with that idea; if it was based on a true story of a woman who managed to do that (or tragically died trying but inspired others to try and succeed), it'd be riveting and score many awards, I'm sure. But in that movie, we'd likely meet our heroine (Eden, played by Janelle Monáe) prior to arriving at the plantation, and get to know her life a bit. An older woman would take a liking to her and show her the ropes, perhaps. Long story short, there would be an *introduction* to her and her situation. But here, we are just thrown into the plantation life, and Eden seems to be respected among the other slaves, but we're not sure why. She certainly doesn't tell us in her own words, since the slaves are forbidden to speak to each other even in private, which seems odd because there is clearly no one around to hear them unless they thought they were being bugged or something. But uh...

You can probably see where I'm going here. If not, last chance to back out!

OK, so thanks to this awkward, exposition free introduction, plus a dead giveaway in the form of a new arrival (Kiersey Clemons) who flat out asks "What IS this place?" as if a grown Black woman during the Civil War would be unaware of what a plantation was, I was quickly left with no choice but to assume that this movie was essentially cribbing the "it's actually not the past, it's modern times" twist from The Village and applying it to plantation life. To be fair, the trailers did some of the legwork for me, as they presented a Jacob's Ladder-y looking thing where a woman in the present (Monáe's character) was seemingly having flashes of another (past?) life on a plantation, whereas the movie didn't show the present day scenes until a good forty minutes in. But even so, there are a number of hints that things are "off" (Clemons' question for one), plus the aforementioned lack of a proper intro that will have any seasoned movie viewer's mind primed to simply EXPECT a twist. Hell there's even a shot that seems directly swiped from The Village, with noises coming from beyond a treeline - at that point I started wondering if it was even supposed to be a surprising reveal as opposed to something the filmmakers simply didn't want to spell out.

Another thing the trailers did was suggest it was a more consistent back and forth kind of deal between the two timelines, which might have helped keep the mystery at bay while making the experience more engaging as a whole. Instead it's just three distinct acts: the opening one on the plantation, which mostly revolves around Monáe and Clemons being tortured, the "modern world" one depicting Eden (actually Victoria, they're given slave names) in her day to day life as a successful writer/activist focusing on women's empowerment, and then back to the plantation - where now people are barely hiding the true nature (one soldier even vapes!) - as she mounts her escape. This severely limits how much time the writer/directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz can spend developing their villains or any of the other slaves who are presumably also trying to get back to their families, making the film feel oddly hollow when it focuses almost entirely on a character who has to act like she has amnesia in order for them to spring their twist on us. The guy running the plantation is actually the state's senator, but apart from a billboard for his reelection and a soft focus TV screen showing him on a cable news show (i.e. two things you can easily miss since they're not the focus of either shot) we know nothing of his public persona. All we get is a handful of quick scenes showing him play-acting on the plantation, where not a single one of the slaves is seemingly ever ballsy enough to say "Wait, aren't you my senator?".

See, while it was pretty silly, the twist in the Village worked as (relatively) well as it did because the only people who were aware that it was really the 21st century were the ones who wanted things to be that way. Everyone else was born into it, not kidnapped, so they had no reason to question their surroundings. Here, apart from Kiersey's vague (and unanswered) question, everyone is just playing the part even in private, so... what, they've all been there for so long that they stopped questioning it? Even with the threat of violence, it's still unbelievable that there wouldn't be an uprising among dozens of people who were plucked out of modern day Atlanta and forced to pick cotton for a handful of racist jerks armed with period weaponry. There isn't any kind of tracking device or even a fence to keep them contained. With the soldiers murdering some of them anyway, how are they all not trying to escape every night? And where are their families? How long has this place - revealed to be on the grounds of a public Civil War reenactment camp - been doing this without being discovered? When some soldiers stop by, are they paying for some kind of "experience" weekend before going back to their normal lives? Or is it like a parttime job? I know they wanted to be the next Get Out, but I kept thinking more of Us, with a fantastical (and not inherently terrible!) concept that unfortunately leaves us with far too many questions about how it can possibly work, making the film feel more and more half baked with every reveal.

One thing it does succeed at is showing how a Black person's "free" life probably doesn't really feel that way to them. In the "past", Monáe is beaten by her oppressors; in the present she is constantly undermined and brushed off via microaggressions - and forced to keep her emotions in check in both. For a while I kept wondering why this was posited as a horror movie (the trailer makes it look far creepier than it ever actually plays as, even manipulating several shots that are totally normal in the film), but it kind of clicked during the Atlanta scenes. Yes there is awful and uncomfortable violence in the first act, but it's likely the horror fans they were targeting have seen such things so many times that the specifics are being somewhat muted. However, I couldn't help but squirm when Monae and her friends arrive at a fancy restaurant and "Becky" the maître d' attempts to seat them on a tiny table near the bathroom, or when Jena Malone's southern belle "compliments" Monáe by saying "you're so articulate!" as if it was a surprise. The average viewer might be far too sickened by the earlier stuff to even get that far, but we "veterans" can deal with it - and then seethe with rage at these "subtler" moments, allowing us to realize the grander point, that she has to deal with them on a daily basis. It's a well executed bit of shorthand, and I'd be curious to hear how these smaller moments played to non-horror fan viewers after the more overt examples of hatred in the first act.

You can't accuse the movie of hiding that "tone" was more important than "narrative coherence" though, as the film opens on an epic tracking shot through the plantation, set to some terrific and haunting score from Nate Wonder and Roman GianArthur. Filmed at magic hour for that perfect contrast between beautiful and horrifying, we see soldiers making their way around the grounds, slaves picking cotton and performing other manual labor, etc, getting the entire setting across in only a few wordless minutes. But it's also part of the problem; it's expertly done on a technical level, but at the expense of the creative side of things, as this is time that could have been spent identifying the characters we aren't really meeting in these technically flawless moments. There is no proper "in" to this world, as it's all held back in favor of a twist that doesn't fully work. I'd argue it never makes much sense for the hero of the film to be so much ahead of the audience in terms of what is going on, and that's exactly what's going on here for nearly half the runtime. By the time we are on the same page as her (when they return to the plantation setting), the movie is almost over, and I for one spent most of the remaining runtime just trying to figure out exactly how any of it worked instead of being as invested in her plight as I might have been with a little more work on the script.

That all said, if you thought it all worked perfectly and enjoyed the movie, I have good news: the Blu-ray is packed. There's a full hour long documentary about its production, a few featurettes (one about the clues the movie offers to its big reveal), the spoilerific trailers, and a handful of deleted scenes. The excised moments feature the senator character at the plantation, which sadly doesn't tell us any more about him but at least gives us a little more context to the relationship he has with Eden/Veronica, so there's something. And the making of actually did explain something: the filmmakers come from a music video and advertising background, so it makes sense than a strong script isn't as much in their wheelhouse as evoking a certain mood and emotion (hell, Bush even admits the story came from a dream he had, a fact that they perhaps should have put in the film where a "based on true events" disclaimer might have gone). Additionally, they talk far more about the cinematography and production design than they do writing or editing, so thanks to this piece (which also reveals an interesting tidbit - they were able to use some lenses that were actually employed on Gone With The Wind) I can forgive the movie a bit for its narrative lapses, as it seems a hole-free story wasn't as important as, essentially, pissing you off that things haven't changed as much as some of us (i.e. white folk like me) might like to believe.

If I'm right, then I guess my issues aren't any more relevant than complaining that an apple pie doesn't have blueberries. No, it doesn't make a lot of sense that they keep you in the dark for so long by having the lead character play along with a facade even when she's alone in a room, but the film does succeed at reminding us that the horrors Black people faced "back then" aren't over, not by a long shot (it's not the film's fault it was ultimately overshadowed by the record BLM protests that this year has inspired thanks to several horrible tragedies). I just can't help but think they could have made that point in a more structurally sound and less dishonest film, and in turn really knocked our socks off the way Get Out (and Us, albeit to a lesser extent) did*. Monáe and the rest of the cast are fantastic (Gabourey Sidibe in particular is a scene stealer, offering the film its only real levity as one of Victoria's BFFs), and it's one of the best-shot films of the year, but it rarely stopped being frustrating long enough to let it all gel into a cohesive masterpiece it might have been.

What say you?

*The three films share a handful of producers and the ads constantly reminded us of this fact (someone from Jordan Peele's company even had to go out of their way on Twitter to clarify that Peele himself was not involved) so it's a fair comparison to make in my opinion.

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