12 Years a Slave (2024)

12 Years a Slave

After Django Unchained and The Butler by Lee Daniels, both of which were informed by the indelible stain of slavery and injustice that America has been, it might seem that you have had your fill of racial hatred, sexual exploitation and vicious brutality in the past twelve months.

You couldn’t be more wrong. Where those commercial and critical successes compensated for their heavy content with flashes of wit and a cool attitude, 12 Years a Slave is a mournful, reflective, nearly lyrical movie that delivers the horrors of bondage right off and on.

For once history is personal and immediate rather than an epic based on academic works and court records like Amistad. The source is the rare primary account from the best selling nineteenth-century memoir written by Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York who was suddenly deprived of his freedom after being kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana.

Although “Django” and “The Butler” were wake-up calls about inequality; this one is a wake-up jolt. As beautiful as these sunrises may appear to be over Southern landscapes framed by twisted branches covered with hanging Spanish mosses here: they are seemingly only there to give viewers a moment to reflect on what we just saw. Even Mel Gibson whose interminable five-minute whipping scene in The Passion of Christ set the standard for such graphic punishments would be appalled if not jealous at British director Steve McQueen’s ability to make audiences feel the searing pain of every lash across their own bodies through his film.

Underpinning such cruelty so unremarkable that while our hero struggles for several hours dangling on tiptoe trying not to break under the noose around his neck workers continue their daily routine as though nothing unusual was happening is Hans Zimmer’s appropriately unsettling occasionally dissonant score reminiscent of his own standout work on Inception but with very different results.

Just as in Precious where it was physically unwatchable but we still could not tear our eyes off Gabourey Sidibe, similarly the gravely powerful Chiwetel Eijofor gives us a reason to keep looking. A British stage actor of Nigerian parentage, he first came to prominence in 2002’s Dirty Pretty Things and has since been simmering away quite unnoticed in mainly support roles as yet. It would be impossible to conceive of 12 Years a Slave without him. His grimaces as his character is made to suppress his true identity at any cost are worth more than an entire screenplay.

In three films, McQueen has proven himself as a filmmaker who tackles difficult subjects without fear but always with a humanist bent: discomfort cinema if you will. His debut movie Hunger delved into the abysses of commitment and despair inside IRA prisoners on their 1981 Irish hunger strike. Shame revealed the corrosive peripheries of sex addiction.

For an even tougher assignment such as “12 Years a Slave,” McQueen tracks Northup, whose papers were stolen and name changed to Platt further obscuring the ever slim chance he had at asserting his freedom while he is moved from one slave owner to another with everything from blissful knights in shining armors caring for them to spine-chilling monsters parading themselves around like plantation owners that never knew what mercy was all about.

Nudity is definitely Steve’s signature. To him, naked bodies are an art medium that a socially conscious sculptor would treat as modeling clay. The intent is not to arouse but to make us ill at ease, like unwitting spectators compelled to witness mankind when it is at its worst and reduced to objects. It doesn’t take long before we see people without clothes in the movie “12 Years a Slave,” for example, male and female cane-field laborers must wash together outside in a yard while the world passes by. Lastly, they sleep a masse in tight quarters where someone makes love with another individual of opposite sex because of loneliness rather than passion.

Like Lee Daniels do in “The Butler,” McQueen packs his film with familiar faces as his reputation grows that are often taken from indie film circles. Paul Giamatti brings dirtiness into his all business slave trader character. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Northup’s first owner, William Ford who has been treating Solomon and Solomon’s talents as a violinist and carpenter well but still strugglings on how best to handle their relation.

Paul Dano gives a chilling portrayal of John Tibeats, a mean-spirited overseer for the Epps plantation who regarded every move Northup made as personal assault just like he did for his preacher role in “There Will Be Blood” while being sadistic.” As Judge Turner on Mad Men, Bryan Batt infuses him with effeminate affectations; meanwhile Alfre Woodard’s fancy lady sips her tea slowly representing ex-slave marriage which was chosen by women for freedom purposes. Dwight Henry from Beasts of the Southern Wild (as a slave) and Quvenzhané Wallis as Northup’s child can even be found here.

However, the real dance between Northup’s most evil master Edwin Epps who gets more than little traces of gray that extend past villainous black care off by McQueen’s frequent collaborator Michael Fassbender and his victimized slave girl, Patsey, who is played with such heartbreaking authenticity by unknown actress Lupita Nyong’o.

Though the movie won numerous awards at film festivals; “12 Years a Slave” does have some rough patches. Unfortunately, Mary (Sarah Paulson) Epps, wife of Edwin is just another incarnation of Maleficent without any complexity as a villain. Also there’s an uncomfortable shift in tone early on as Northup a loving family man who is rather foppish and full of himself in the beginning falls for a trick and believes that he has been recruited into a company of traveling artists.

The next thing he knows after one night’s heavy drink is waking up to find himself shackled and alone in a dark pit. It’s Edgar Allan Poe disguised as Walt Disney’s Pinocchio, the puppet boy sucked into going to Pleasure Island by swindlers. Obviously this is evocative of those fairy tales but it jars.

By the time Brad Pitt, one of the film’s producers comes late into the story with an irritating cameo role as a Canadian carpenter who gives Northup hope that his twelve years will soon be over; or too much for most audiences to care about after all they have gone through? And when they are ready to leave their seats with tears still wet on their faces one thing will be in their minds: That they have seen American slavery at its worst for their first time ever.

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