Antebellum

Antebellum

The movie “Antebellum” is like a M. Night Shyamalan movie gone wrong, leaving you in a state of what-the-fuck-did-I-just-watch for the rest of the day, and not in a good way, like “Serenity.”

It’s also based on a big twist, one that is supposed to blow your mind at the 40-minute mark before blowing it once more with several climactic reveals in the third act. And surprise! “Antebellum” wants to be About Something. It wants to comment on the racial unrest of our current times as an extension of centuries of systematic oppression.

But Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s debut feature is both wildly ambitious and half-baked. It’s got style out the wazoo from its impossibly long tracking shot at the beginning to its vibrant costumes by frequent Coen brothers collaborator Mary Zophres, but at its heart, it has no idea what it wants to say. A title card at the start trots out that familiar William Faulkner quote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Could that really be all these guys are trying to say?

However dazzling it may be visually, though, “Antebellum” leaves behind an icky aftertaste with its leering depiction of violent slavery tropes. You’ve seen this woman run for her life across the fields of a plantation as Confederate soldiers on horseback gallop after her stuff before; here, her green dress matches the tall blades of grass just so while magic-hour sunlight glistens off her face as tears stream down it. A rope drops around her neck and drags her to the ground as a string heavy score swells insistently. All in slow motion so we can wallow in every lurid detail. This is just the opening sequence.

Eden (Janelle Monáe) bears the brunt of the abuse as a slave who has dared to orchestrate an escape attempt. A Confederate leader known only as “Him” (Eric Lange) beats the shit out of her in her quarters as punishment before branding her and claiming her as his own. Jack Huston adds a not so subtle vibe of menace as a sadistic and slightly sloshed officer, and Jena Malone drips with honeyed villainy as his wife.

And yet it takes place long ago until we see Civil War troops marching at night, carrying torches and chanting “blood and soil” on their way to a dinner where “Him” addresses them in a rousing speech with some familiar phrasing. “This is the only hope we have of retaining our heritage, our way of life,” he tells them; all refrains we’ve heard recently from white supremacists and alt-righters as they engage in racist demonstrations of hatred and violence.

All of a sudden, the place changes and Eden wakes up in a modern townhouse with her handsome husband (Marque Richardson) and cute daughter (London Boyce), who bounds into their fluffy bed for snuggles. Now she’s Veronica, a successful author and pundit living large all the gritty grained darkness of the plantation replaced by sleekness and light. (The images, always luscious even when the actual contents of the frame are not, are courtesy of Uruguayan cinematographer Pedro Luque Briozzo.)

So what gives? What’s real? Who is Eden/Veronica? The actuality is much less profound than it seems, though it’s dressed up with cutesy references to Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee that are likelier to prompt eye-rolls than oohs and ahhs. Gabourey Sidibe brings some badly needed high energy as Veronica’s sidekick/BFF who’s always got a sassy one-liner or bitchy quip at the ready in a Valley Girl voice, but it feels like she wandered in from an entirely different movie a rom-com in which her character would be an offensive black stereotype.

Just as Eden’s slave story line feels trite and cliched, Veronica’s shiny life of wealth and perfection is superficial in its own way. Everyone and everything is too polished there’s nothing for us to grab onto as viewers. And maybe that was Bucher and Renz’s point: to challenge the hackneyed ways African-American stories are so often depicted on screen. But what they end up doing instead is more of the same without much insight.

Monáe is radiant as always; she provides an instant connection in both realms because she has such commanding presence on-screen regardless of material although even she can only do so much when there’s so little to her character between endless victimization and empty platitudes of empowerment.

Watch Antebellum For Free On Gomovies.