The movie of the decade: frank and seemingly ordinary at times, yet powerful and stunning. This film has certainly changed the landscape for historical dramas of that period and maybe for other periods.
Following are two reviews. One from my local paper (the San Jose, California Mercury news) and the other a commentary from the Washington post.
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Review: Is '12 Years a Slave' the best film of 2013?
By Randy Myers San Jose Mercury News contributor San Jose Mercury News
Posted: MercuryNews.com
Everything you've heard about "12 Years a Slave" is true.
That it's so horrific at points you'll need to turn away from the screen. That it will make you sob uncontrollably and render you emotionally spent. That it's an unflinching look at the cruel and nauseating reality of slavery, a bloody stain on American history.
But this, the best film of 2013 so far, is not intended to needlessly subjugate and brutalize its audience. British-born director Steve McQueen's uncompromising adaptation of Solomon Northrup's 1853 account of a free black man who's sold into slavery is not only damningly powerful, it's damn well important both
historically and cinematically. The film takes an ugly topic that's too often been packaged in neatly sanitized snippets or told through the filtered perspective of a noble white bystander and gives it the voice, integrity and intensity it demands.
From the Oscar-caliber performances -- Chiwetel Ejiofor in the lead and Lupita Nyong'o and Michael Fassbender in supporting roles -- to the devastating images created by McQueen, "12 Years a Slave" is a modern cinematic masterpiece. Each role on-screen and off makes it stronger: Joe Walker's precise
editing, Hans Zimmer's haunting soundtrack, the transformative production design by Adam Stockhausen and costume design by Patricia Norris.
We meet Solomon when he's living as a freed family man in New York during the pre-Civil War days. His nightmarish ordeal begins when he's kidnapped and sent to Louisiana, where he's turned into human livestock for 12 long years. Nothing is sugarcoated here -- the lashings, the beatings, the pokings, the
proddings, the sheer ugliness of a white man at his worst. What does offer an ember of hope is how it shows the resilient spirit of a black man stuck in a freak show of moral decay.
Yes, "Slave" is demanding. Still, it's never gratuitous or sensationalized.
The sequence that hit me hardest is a long scene in which Solomon is seen strung up to a tree, gasping for air as his feet graze the ground just enough to keep him breathing. As this hideous torture show plays
itself out, children romp nearby, enjoying the lovely day. Without a doubt, these contrasting images create one of most deeply disturbing scenes I've ever witnessed in a film.
McQueen is a bold director, allowing his camera to linger long enough to create an unsettling mood. He's also a provocateur, a man who latches onto grim topics -- from a starving British IRA activist ("Hunger") to a sex addict with sister issues ("Shame"). Both works were excellent but almost clinical in their emotional
distance. "12 Years a Slave" puts you, me, all of us right into the shoes and the soul of Solomon.
That happens not only because of McQueen's direction, but Ejiofor's impassioned, vulnerable performance. Ejiofor ("Kinky Boots") has long been an actor on the cusp, and here he gets his breakout
role. His Solomon is a smart guy, a violinist and proud family man who is sold to William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), a minister who fancies himself a benevolent master even as he callously separates one of
his purchases (Adepero Oduye) from her children. Solomon works hard for William, but he lands in trouble when he gets into a fight with a creepy carpenter (Paul Dano).
He has been given the name Platt and eventually winds up on a plantation owned by Edwin Epps (Fassbender, in his most complex role yet), a sociopath who's married to a pseudo-pious woman (a frightening Sarah Paulson). Caught in the middle of this highly dysfunctional relationship is Patsey
(Nyong'o, in a career-making performance), who is raped by Epps and traumatized endlessly by his wife. This awful couple subject Solomon and Patsey to unfathomable injustices, forcing Nyong'o and Ejiofor to
go to dark places.
The one flaw with "Slave" comes in the form of Brad Pitt's character, Samuel Bass, and you sense screenwriter John Ridley struggling to further the story along with Pitt's abolitionist from Canada. While Pitt is fine, his dialogue is stiff, intended to be the bridge for the next development. Fortunately, it doesn't diminish the film's overall effect.
The greatest challenge McQueen's masterwork likely will encounter is a reluctance by the public to see such a disturbing film. But just as "Saving Private Ryan" revealed what life in the D-Day trenches was like, "Schindler's List" put us inside a Nazi concentration camp, and the 1977 miniseries "Roots" finally gave voice to the black experience in America, "12 Years a Slave" presents us with an unvarnished, uncensored and much-needed view of history.
This is not medicine for America to swallow; it's filmmaking of the highest caliber.
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What Art Says About the Past
By Richard Cohen, Published: November 4
I sometimes think I have spent years unlearning what I learned earlier in my life. For
instance, it was not George A. Custer who was attacked at the Little Bighorn. It was
Custer — in a bad career move — who attacked the Indians. Much more important,
slavery was not a benign institution in which mostly benevolent whites owned
innocent and grateful blacks. Slavery was a lifetime’s condemnation to an often
violent hell in which people were deprived of life, liberty and, too often, their own
children. Happiness could not be pursued after that.
Steve McQueen’s stunning movie “12 Years a Slave” is one of those unlearning experiences. I had to wonder why I could not recall another time when I was so shockingly confronted by the sheer barbarity of American slavery. Instead, beginning with school, I got a gauzy version. I learned that slavery was wrong, yes, that it was evil, no doubt, but really, that many blacks were
sort of content. Slave owners were mostly nice people — fellow Americans, after all — and the sadistic Simon Legree was the concoction of that demented propagandist, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was a lie and she never — and this I
remember clearly being told — had ventured south to see slavery for herself. I felt some relief at that because it meant that Tom had not been flogged to death.
But in the novel, he had. And of course, slavery was not only incomprehensibly cruel — it had to have had consequences. You can see those consequences in this marvelous, harrowing and concussively powerful movie. Families are broken up — not just like that, with a casual statement of fact, but with a rending of garments and an awful pain and a tearing of the soul. A mother
cries for her children and the wife of the slave owner tells her, in effect, to get over it: Time heals all wounds. Not so. Generations later, the hurt lingers.
There is nothing of “12 Years a Slave” in “Gone with the Wind.” It is not the fetching and lovely Scarlett who whips her slaves and sells off their children so she can buy a ball gown in nearby Atlanta. It is not her father who goes to the slave market and leeringly examines naked women. It is no one in that lying picture who insists that the slaves remain illiterate — learning being, as we all know, a dangerous thing. “12 Years a Slave” has finally rendered “Gone with the Wind” irrevocably silly and utterly tasteless, a cinematic bodice-ripper. McQueen’s movie has more than a little unlearning in it.
It has been decades since the gauze was removed to show the horror of American slavery. I know more than I once did, maybe more than most and maybe more than I like. Still, McQueen does something daring. He doesn’t focus on an institution or, as in Quentin Tarantino’s somewhat cartoonish “Django Unchained,” on cruel whites but on the effect of slavery on a single black man. In “12 Years a Slave” that man is Solomon Northup, the author of the best-selling book upon which this movie is based.
Northup was a musician living in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. He was a free man until, in 1841, he was lured to Washington, D.C., and — with the Capitol looming in the background — sold into slavery. The heightened poignancy of his tale comes from the fact that he was not a slave yearning for something he never had but a man deprived of what was once his — his home, his wife, his children and, pertinently, his freedom. He goes from being a human being to a blotted entry on a ledger. We can all connect to
that. At the same time, we connect less with the slaves he left behind when he was freed. He is restored to the life he once had. They remain with the life they have always had.
“12 Years a Slave” is art at its highest, not just on account of mastery or talent but because of what it makes yesterday say about today. We obscured, we covered up — we made the past conform to the present and insisted that hurt or pain had no right to
persist, as if family tales told at the kitchen table dissipate when the silverware is put away. As a nation, we like to look pretty, but sometimes we weren’t. The grave obligation of art is to show us what we look like. McQueen has held up a mirror. God, we look
ugly.
Read more from Richard Cohen’s archive.
