The Birth of a Nation dilemma: How to disentangle the director from the work?

Things were looking great for Nate Parker in January. The Birth of a Nation, his account of a violent 1831 Virginia slave uprising, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and immediately became the object of a fierce bidding war. Fox Searchlight, the specialty house that nabbed best picture Oscars in recent years for Slumdog Millionaire, 12 Years a Slave, and Birdman, paid a reported $17.5 million for Parker's powerful antebellum drama - a Sundance record.

Parker, who directed, cowrote, and stars as the rebel slave Nat Turner, seemed a sure thing to carry his film through the awards season gauntlet all the way to the 2017 Academy Awards.

#OscarsSoWhite? Not this time.

And then, in August, reports of Parker's Penn State troubles resurfaced: a 1999 rape charge against Parker and Jean McGianni Celestin, his friend and story collaborator on The Birth of a Nation. Parker was acquitted in 2001; Celestin was convicted, but the conviction was overturned. The woman who accused the two students of rape committed suicide in 2012.

Now, with The Birth of a Nation poised for release Friday, Parker and Fox Searchlight find themselves grappling with a major problem.

[Read more: Nate Parker unapologetic in '60 Minutes' interview]

It doesn't help matters that there's a rape in The Birth of a Nation - a slave, married to Parker's Nat Turner and played with taut effect by Aja Naomi King, is sexually assaulted by a gang of white men. The rape itself isn't shown on camera, just its traumatic aftermath.

The Birth of a Nation isn't a perfect film - it lacks the cinematic mastery of Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave; the characters aren't all fully formed. But Parker's movie, which subverts the like-titled century-old D.W. Griffith silent ode to the Ku Klux Klan, memorializes a pivotal episode in America's sad history of racial oppression.

By the time Nina Simone's startlingly beautiful and horrific "Strange Fruit" comes on the sound track, with its imagery of dead black men and women hanging from trees, this mournful study of America's holocaust achieves a kind of greatness. No wonder it won the grand jury prize and the audience award at Sundance.

Now, tainted by scandal and controversy, is it possible to see the film in the same way Park City crowds did? To emerge from the theater and not feel conflicted?

That's a question, and a dilemma, that has come up before, certainly, and that still arises every time Woody Allen, say, or Roman Polanski, releases a new work. (Allen has a new Amazon series, Crisis in Six Scenes, keeping that particular dilemma fresh.)

It's a profound quandary: How to separate the art from the artist? Or should we separate them?

nolead begins

nolead ends I argue that we should. If the film - or the book, the painting, the poem - grabs onto your spirit, your soul, your intellect in important ways, what do the failures and faults of the human behind that work really matter?

Yet, a long history of the reception for tainted Hollywood directors' movies suggests that The Birth of a Nation might never disentangle itself from its director's personal backstory.

Without fail, my inbox rattles with angry, admonishing missives every time I write (favorably or not) about Allen - the allegations of sexual abuse, the marriage to Soon Yi Previn, Mia Farrow's adopted daughter, cited again.

Polanski, who fled the country in 1978 rather than face sentencing in a trial in which he pleaded guilty to unlawful intercourse with a minor - and who has lived and worked in Europe since - received seven Academy Award nominations for his autobiographically tinged Holocaust drama, The Pianist. It didn't win best picture that year (the 2002 movie musical Chicago did - sigh), but Polanski won best director; his star, Adrien Brody, best actor; Polanski's script, best adapted screenplay.

Never mind the World War II drama's power and poignancy, there were many people, inside and outside the academy, who felt that according any kind of honor was morally wrong. Polanski's recent films, especially The Ghost Writer and his adaptations of the theater pieces Carnage and Venus in Fur, continue to thrum with energy, wit, and style. And they continue to provoke.

A similarly bitter debate took place in 1999 when Elia Kazan - the giant innovative director behind A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, and East of Eden - was awarded an honorary Oscar. About 47 years earlier, he had testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, naming names in the anti-Communist hearings and wrecking the careers of several of his actor and playwright colleagues.

Dozens of Academy members, who had lobbied unsuccessfully to repeal the award, refused to applaud Kazan that night - the betrayal of his brethren during the long-ago era of the Hollywood blacklist still stung. Outside the theater, there were pickets, protesters. Never mind the memorable performances he got out of Marlon Brando and James Dean, the dazzling artistry and innovation of Kazan's screen work; many felt he shouldn't have been a contender.

Mel Gibson's career hit a rough patch in 2010, a half-dozen years after his controversial and violent The Passion of the Christ became an unexpected box office hit. Back then, Gibson shrugged off assertions from the Anti-Defamation League and other groups that his Aramaic-language epic about the last hours in the life of Christ was anti-Semitic.

But in 2010, when TMZ posted audio recordings alleged to be of Gibson - sounding drunk and spouting racist and anti-Semitic screeds - the actor was dropped by his longtime agency. Civil rights activists called for a boycott of his movies.

Jodie Foster stuck by Gibson's side, casting him in the odd (and oddly entertaining) 2011 pic The Beaver, and Gibson has gone on to act again, and direct. His World War II drama Hacksaw Ridge - about a conscientious objector on the front lines - is set for release next month. Reviews from the Venice Film Festival, where it premiered in early September, were strong. But Gibson, the Braveheart Oscar winner, an unarguably able and adventurous director, is still viewed by many with a wary eye.

Charges of anti-Semitism have also dogged Roald Dahl, the late and, yes, great British author whose wondrous, strange children's tales - Fantastic Mr. Fox, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Witches among them - have been turned into pretty wondrous movies, too. In an interview from the Cannes Film Festival in May, Steven Spielberg - whose childhood movie camera is part of the permanent collection at the National Museum of American Jewish History here in Philadelphia - was asked whether he felt comfortable making a film from one of Dahl's books, given its author's alleged bias against Jews. Spielberg's The BFG, from a Dahl children's book, opened this year's festival.

At the post-screening news conference, Spielberg said that, at the time he started work on the adaptation, he was unaware of Dahl's reputed prejudices (prejudices that have just been reaffirmed by Dahl's longtime editor Robert Gottlieb in his new memoir, Avid Reader: A Life).

Here's part of what Spielberg, director of Schindler's List, founder of the USC Shoah Foundation, said to critic Manohla Dargis at Cannes, citing that other Birth of a Nation in the process:

"I think that all of us who stand on the shoulders of the giants who began the industry have run into that conundrum when talking about The Birth of a Nation and D.W. Griffith and the exaltation of the Ku Klux Klan. Now, I don't know what I would have done if I'd known this [about Dahl] before BFG. I didn't research Dahl. That's no excuse.

"But I said this in the press conference, and I really mean it: For somebody who has proclaimed himself anti-Semitic, to be telling stories that just do the opposite, embracing the differences between races and cultures and sizes and language, as Dahl did with The BFG, it's a paradox."

The sort of paradox that anyone serious about film, about art, will have to continue to deal with.

steven.rea@yahoo.com

@Steven_Rea