By Kyle Osborne
Painful to watch, but impossible to look away from, ’12 Years A Slave,’ based on the 1853 memoir of Solomon Northup, is an eye-opener in the most wrenching possible way. Director Steve McQueen’s unflinching take on the epic journey of a free and well-educated New Yorker, (Chiwetel Ejiofor, get your acceptance speeches ready) who is kidnapped and sold by slave traders, will be remembered for decades.
Taken from his wife and children and now living on a plantation bordering the Louisiana swamps, Northup, a talented musician who is used to having his say, must learn to keep his head down or suffer the brutal consequences. After one particular infraction, he is hung from a tree branch, barely staying alive by lightly standing on his tip-toes, a millimeter away from death. In this scene, and many others, McQueen holds the camera on his subject—still holding, still holding—long past the moment when watching goes from uncomfortable to something—how to say it? Something even worse. It’s as if the director has grabbed us by the scruff and said, “You cannot look away. You must see this and acknowledge it.”
Some may feel that things cross over into Melodrama, but scholars have verified the veracity of Northup’s memoir, and if the film stays close to that book (which I have yet to read) then no one can criticize the film for its depiction of the depraved slave owners. Paul Dano’s crazed take on an over-seer is a bit one-note, and Benedict Cumberbatch, as a kinder, yet clueless, owner, are not as multidimensional as one would hope. At least we have a nasty villain, worthy of a great actor.
Which brings us to Michael Fassbender, who plays Edwin Epps, one of a few men to have owned Solomon, and certainly the most rabidly evil. Fassbender has said he won’t campaign for awards this season, but his uncompromising performance won’t go un-noticed. It’s a fully realized embodiment of a loathsome man, every bit as scary as a Ted Bundy, only he is free to commit his crimes against humans right out in the front yard—after all, as the argument went back then, it was his “property” and he could do as cialis no rx he pleased.
The recipient of both frequent sexual assaults and flesh-ripping beatings from Epps is Patsey, played by Lupita Nyong’o with utter authenticity. Patsey is a particularly heartbreaking character who is the rare person who can see the real Solomon Northup. The scenes between these two are among the best.
The title itself is a bit of a spoiler, but I won’t go further into how and when Solomon Northup can finally stop pretending to be illiterate, lest the cruel over-seers beat him within an inch of his life. So much of Ejiofor’s performance has to come from the eyes, the facial expressions and things unsaid. It really is a thing of beauty, his performance. It’s like a virtuoso musician who understands that it isn’t the number of notes one plays, it’s the spaces between the notes that matter most.
Not to compare the two films, which are different and whose subject matter must always be considered singularly, and never by comparison—but the feelings I had, as a viewer, were strikingly similar to what I felt watching “Schindler’s List”; one is ashamed that human beings could legally commit such evil against others, one is uplifted by the display of human spirit among those who should have the least of it to spare, and one is hopeful that things have changed, and there’s no going back.
However, when Northup is first captured and is indignantly insisting that he is, in fact, a free and educated man, not a runaway slave, the response from the slave trader is, “Solve this, then…produce your papers.” It’s a line that sounds disgustingly close to what has been said to the President of the United States for the past four years. One step forward, two steps back. Some things haven’t changed much since 1853.
No matter how noble the subject matter, if this were a bad movie, I obviously could not and would not recommend it. But, like Schindler’s List, it is quality story-telling that includes first rate acting, and the firm, but artistic, hand of its assured director. “12 Years A Slave” is a must-see film.
“12 Years A Slave is Rated “R” It gets Four out of Four Stars