If questioned, most people would say
that they went to the cinema in order to be entertained, and to laugh; or
thrilled, and to be amazed or tricked into thinking that one outcome would
occur in a story and then be pleasantly surprised when it turns out that an
alternate outcome is more satisfying.
The new film from Turner
prizewinning
director Steve McQueen tells the harrowing and brutal true story of Solomon
Northup, a free man sold into slavery in 1840s America.
Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) was a
lower-middle class carpenter living with his wife and children in Saratoga New
York. Here he one day meets two
travelling musicians who convince him to go to Washington to earn some money in
a circus as he is a skilled fiddle player.
Here he is drugged, beaten and forced into slavery under the name
‘Platt’ and is transported down river to the South to be mercilessly sold.
At first he is bought by the relatively
(!) sympathetic slaveholder ‘Master’ Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch) and forced to
work with his carpentry skills. Here he
meets the stupid and sadistic Tibeats (Paul Dano) who humiliates him at every
opportunity. When an argument leads to
Tibeats bringing some men to try and lynch Solomon, Ford is forced to transfer
him to the drunken and violent Edwin Epps’ plantation where he has to pick
cotton for years in an atmosphere of random violence and cruelty. He is finally rescued with the help of a
white Canadian worker (Brad Pitt) who manages to send a letter to Solomon’s
family and friends in the North, who travel down to rescue him.
At times the film contains unwatchable
violence and racism, but never does the content feel gratuitous. Unlike the whipping scenes in the laughable Passion Of The Christ that are brutal in
order for you to empathise, and therefore to strengthen your relationship with,
Jesus Christ; the violence in 12 Years
makes you detest the culture and practice of slavery instead of trying to
highlight the plight of just one victim.
Few cinematic experiences have left me feeling so appalled and ashamed
at our collective history than this one.
On the plantation Solomon meets the
beautiful female slave Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o) who has become the sexual
plaything of Epps. Over the years Patsey
begs Solomon to end her life due to the violence and rape that she is subjected
to, and becomes the embodiment of the injustice and savagery that is
perpetrated by white America around this time.
Solomon is told early on by another
slave that the best way to survive is by keeping his head down and saying as
little as possible. This offends him
intensely as he was a free man only a few days earlier, he does not just want
to survive he wants to live. Yet he soon
learns that he must do exactly that in order to minimize the violence to him
and others around him by his actions.
Due to McQueen’s artistic heritage, the
film is masterfully constructed. The
cinematography is beautiful – even in moments of heinous violence the action is
framed beautifully. There is a scene
where Solomon is about to be lynched, but an overseer who demands that the
slave’s owner be contacted interrupts the act.
Solomon is left hanging, barely able to stand on the tips of his toes in
the mud, until Ford arrives. The scene
is filmed from afar and without score and lingers onscreen for a number of
minutes, the other slaves slowly building up the courage to go about their business
after witnessing the incident. All of
them are too scared to help him and have learned to ignore the violence – even
children play in the background over his shoulder. The scene, seen in a cinema, felt like an
important moment in cinema history; an instant classic that profoundly disturbed
the audience – the cinema was whisper quiet.
The film will no doubt deservedly sweep
up over the award season, but the one award that I felt it most deserved on
first viewing was that of Best
Sound Mixing. There are some
haunting transitions where the sound from two scenes overlapped to create
painful metaphors: One scene of a slave
women crying over the loss of her children cuts to a makeshift outdoor church
where a slaveowner is preaching to his property about morality, yet the cries
from the woman continue over the sermon.
Another scene has Solomon playing the fiddle for the twisted amusement
of his owners, yet as the camera tracks in to his face for a close-up the film
score creeps in (discordantly at first) to replace the fiddle music and
highlight the painful absurdity of the situation.
Music plays an important role throughout
the film. The slaves often sing
beautiful gospel songs to show solidarity and to make the grueling work more
tolerable. There is also a scene where a
number of slaves bump into a collection of Native Americans – and the first
thing they do is sit around and sing and dance.
It is hard to enjoy these songs given their tragic inception, but they
are undeniably powerful scenes.
A particularly heartbreaking moment near
the end of the film shows the slaves singing a song at an impromptu funeral for
a worker who died due to exhaustion from the heat. As they sing, the camera tracks into
Solomon’s drained face as he begins reluctantly join them in song – a painful
instant as he begins to resign to his fate on the farm…
The film deserves mainstream success as
well as fawning critical compliments and should be seen by as many people as
possible. It is an unspoken truth that
slavery still
exists around the world today, and not just in far away “third world”
places. This film should become a
tipping point for a global discussion about modern slavery, as well as opening avenues
to discuss the dark
legacy of British slavery. It should also be a reminder to anyone who uses the word nigger of where the word comes from and what it really means.
The Nazi holocaust is often viewed as an
abhorrent travesty of modern industrial genocide. Yet the efficient legal justifications and
practice employed to market and trade the lives of slaves (especially the
children who are sold in terms of future strength or to be used as sex slaves)
seems as coldly bureaucratic and cruel.
It is pointless to try and quantitatively compare historic atrocities,
but 12 Years A Slave should
definitely silence some of the reverse-racism confederate apologists who exist
today in modern America.
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