Director Steve McQueen is no stranger to heavy subjects, covering sex addiction in 2011's Shame and the 1981 IRA hunger strike in 2008's Hunger. Now he's tackled slavery.
12 Years A Slave
Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch and Lupita Nyong’o. Directed by Steve McQueen.
12 Years A Slave is an adaptation of the eponymous 1853 memoir, chronicling Solomon Northup, a free black man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the mid-1800s, where he worked on Louisianan plantations for over a decade.
McQueen is also quite familiar with Michael Fassbender, who has become somewhat of a mainstay in the director's catalogue, starring in both of his previous features, and continuing the trend in Slave, with a standout performance as repugnant plantation owner Edwin Epps.
If Chiwetel Ejiofor, in his portrayal of Solomon Northup, is the boat, Fassbender is the river that carries it, driving the picture from the moment he appears on screen. Also notable are Benedict Cumberbatch, playing the quasi-empathetic, vastly more likable (at least as far as slave owners go) William Ford, and Paul Dano as a vile plantation carpenter, John Tibeats.
Northup picks cotton and performs other physical, back-breaking work under a blazing Southern sun. He's a free man, he claims several times during the film's 134-minute runtime, but his pleas are met with scorn and hatred, indifference at best, leaving Northup to witness _ and fall victim to _ the whip-pings, beatings, rapes and lynchings that had become standard practice at the time. Black people were regarded as lower than animals, property to be strewn about and discarded at will. And while that's not exactly a little known fact, audiences can't miss it in Slave, which is a sobering look into a very real _ and oft-glossed-over _ aspect of relatively recent US history.
McQueen, a black British citizen, is deft in his no-holds-barred look at the infinitely uncomfortable topic.
He pulls no punches, but does not over-vilify, either. It's true that the film's antagonists are almost exclusively white, and that Slave is a film about racism, bigotry and intolerance, but it's not accusatory, delivering its messages frankly, without overt anger.
John Ridley's screenplay is tight, and frequent McQueen collaborator Sean Bobbit is more than capable as the film's cinematographer, capturing unflinchingly the bleakness, the hopelessness, of enslaved blacks' lives (an extended long shot of Northup, nearly lynched after an altercation with Dano's Tibeats, only the very tips of his toes touching the ground as he fights for air, comes to mind).
For the majority of the film Northup's face is a mixture of horror, pain and bewilderment. It's as if he can't believe it's all happening, that it's some sort of bad dream. It is a nightmare, but only in a metaphorical sense, because what's happening to Northup is all too real.
"You miserable black dogs," plantation owner Epps snarls, a little more than three-quarters of the way through the film, "stand like the deaf and dumb."
He's searching for Patsey, a young slave woman he's been raping. She's nowhere to be found.
"Speak!" he screams, into a terrified slave's face.
Patsey (the excellent Lupita Nyong'o) appears, and Epps' rage is directed towards her. She'd only gone to get a bar of soap, she cries. "I stink so much I make myself gag!"
She's strapped to a post in the yard, going along with it all in a daze, willingly offering her arms as they're tied, weeping.
Epps shoves a whip into Northup's chest.
"Beat her," he says. "Give her the whip; give it all to her." And Northup does. It's severe, stark _ but not quite hard enough. When Epps puts a gun to his head, Northup picks up the pace, the intensity, of his lashes.
"You will strike her until her flesh is rent, and meat and blood flow or I will kill every nigger in my sight," Epps says.
Its brutality makes the film difficult to watch at times, but it also makes for compelling, if controversial, cinema. There's no comfortable way to tell a story like this without diverting into fantasy, and while it's hardly a family flick, it is an important _ and a great _ one. 12 Years A Slave isn't the most fun audiences can have at the movies, but it is riveting and thought-provoking, which proves more than enough to warrant its ticket price. Slave saw an early November release in the US, where it was met with wide acclaim. Buzz around the film was high after its premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado and its subsequent screening at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the People's Choice Award.
Since then it has bagged a slew of major award wins and nominations, most recently picking up a statue for best motion picture, drama at the Golden Globes in Los Angeles.
It will almost certainly garner Oscar nominations (which at the time of this review's publication had not yet been announced) _ if not wins _ for best picture, McQueen's direction and, in all probability, for several of the film's stars.
