Review: 12 YEARS A SLAVE

12 YEARS A SLAVE    (BIOPIC/DRAMA)
4 out of 4 stars
Directed by Steve McQueen
Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Lupita Nyong'o, Benedict Cumberbatch, Sarah Paulson, Paul Dano, Brad Pitt, Paul Giamatti, Garret Dillahunt
R for violence/cruelty, some nudity and brief sexuality.
Verdict:  Admittedly, it is a film that feels so important that any attempt at criticism is made with reluctance, but there's nothing legitimate to complain about anyway.  Steve McQueen's cinematic interpretation of Solomon Northup's autobiographical account of slave life in the antebellum American South is justly the defining film on the subject to date and deserves to be seen if only to educate Americans on the absolute reality of a historic shame which we have too often shook our heads at before patting ourselves on the back for putting a stop to it, while the wounds continue to fester.
YOU MAY ENJOY 12 YEARS A SLAVE IF YOU LIKED:
AMISTAD (1997)
LINCOLN (2012)
DJANGO UNCHAINED (2012)
SHAME (2011)
HUNGER (2008) 

In 1932, in order to quell the accusations that it glorified the lifestyles of its criminal subjects and to avoid the wrath of the censors, Howard Hawks' SCARFACE, loosely and unofficially based on the then-contemporary Al Capone, was released with a subtitle; "THE SHAME OF A NATION."  Seven years later, under the notoriously strict Production Code Office, which prohibited 'morally objectionable' content from appearing in the major studio films prior to the creation of the ratings system, the epic adaptation of the best-selling novel Gone With the Wind, made it to theater screens to become the highest-grossing film of all time in 1937 (still the #1 movie of all time when adjusted for inflation).  Despite its romanticized depiction of an affectionate master-slave relationship in the institution of slavery, with exaggerated stereotypes of slaves who range from quaintly childish adults to blustering "mammies," but all of whom love and stick to "the master," poor, suffering and dreadfully unlikable Scarlett O'Hara, the biggest issue of controversy was the famous line, "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn."  No doubt Al Capone was a criminal of the nastiest order, but I'm compelled to think that the Shame of a Nation label could be better fitted to Miss O'Hara.
Slavery was born in our nation's blood, part of our nation's DNA at the very beginning.  The Founding Fathers, who we revere like saints while we fret and pain over over what they would have wanted over two centuries later, were not unmarked by this stain, and many of them were slave owners, some apologetically, but slave owners nonetheless.  And yet, today, many people insist on defying any addressing of this issue, and those who bring it up are accused of "race-baiting," so any legitimate or illegitimate commentary on race relations is made out to be malicious pot-stirring.  Such accusers claim that racism is "dead" and insist on a supposedly "color-blind" world, after all, slavery was abolished in the United States nearly 150 years ago, but while we try so hard to push it behind us so that we can move on, one doesn't have to look very far to see the continuing aftershocks of the wicked institution comparable to the Holocaust.  This is why Steve McQueen's 12 YEARS A SLAVE is as important a film as can be claimed.
Based on an autobiographical novel  published in 1853 which was an early rallying cry for abolition before it was overshadowed by Uncle Tom's Cabin and fell into obscurity sometime after the Civil War before being re-discovered by historians in the early 1960s and republished in an annotated version in which the historians had investigated the account and found it to be a highly accurate record.  The story is that of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free-born and educated black man in the pre-Civil War 19th Century, living in New York with a wife and two kids.  A professional violinist, Northup is offered the prospect of touring with a traveling show, but when he travels to Washington, D.C. to have the details worked out, he wakes up the morning after a night out with his prospective employers, to find himself in chains to be transported with slaves down to Louisiana.  Assigned the identity of "Platt," every time Solomon attempts to inform someone of his situation, it results in severe beatings and Solomon learns that to survive in this world, he must keep a low profile or risk potentially deadly punishment.  He's first sold to William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), a New Orleans plantation owner and preacher, who is a decent man, as far as those who own other human being go, but his overseer, John Tibeats (Paul Dano), is a cruel and short-tempered man who comes to blows with Solomon, forcing Ford to sell his favored slave rather than let Tibeats kill him.  The man who buys him next is an especially cruel man, Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), who lords over a cotton plantation and has an indecent interest in his most accomplished cotton-picker, a demure young lady named Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o), bringing out the equally fearsome cruelty of Epps' wife.

I didn't feel as emotionally engaged in 12 YEARS A SLAVE as I had with SCHINDLER'S LIST, the standard for documentative narrative epics about real-life atrocities, but 12 YEARS is a subtler film, gradually bringing its narrative to a boil before it explodes into an emotionally-charged last half hour or so.
Like SCHINDLER'S LIST aspired toward being with its respective subject though, 12 YEARS is as comprehensive a narrative work on the institution of slavery prior to the Civil War as could possibly be hoped for.  It isn't a sensationalist work, and although it is the story of a man in one sense, it is also a film about how the institution of slavery dehumanized a man, dehumanized a race, and dehumanized a nation.  Few films have as high of ambitions as this, and far fewer have tackled them successfully, but 12 YEARS A SLAVE is as close as possible as one can imagine to a fully-fleshed cinematic portrayal of its shameful subject.  The most obvious victims are the slaves themselves, torn apart from their families in a business where "it could not be helped," subject to the whims of unpredictable masters, and even with the less cruel masters, there's little accounting for what the overseers or other circumstances will bring.  There's a conversation in the film when Solomon tries to justify for Master Ford that "considering the circumstances" he's a good man, but a slave woman rebukes him because, "considering the circumstances, he owns slaves."  It seems that only too many times have I heard about how most of the slave owners were decent, and the slaves basically worked for food and board, and that many slaves admired their masters and how many slave-owning plantation masters were morally upstanding; which of course is sick.  People say such things generally admit that slavery was bad, and that even though the slaves had it, as some would ignorantly say, "pretty good," it was unfortunate that they didn't have a choice in the matter.  Maybe that sounds extreme to some, but an upbringing in a conservative rural area has its own peculiarities.  The fact is that the act of slavery is not one that can be justified, and it should never have been there from the beginning, and I can't believe that even the bloodiest of civil wars was not a better route than waiting for however long until the practice dissipated, while who knows how many human beings languishing as the literal property of another from birth until death.  Even worse, the demeaning of what is essentially a human being, even a "lesser human being" according to the archaic views of slavery, as livestock, opens the doorway to inhumanly cruel behavior, from flagellation to the noose.
Less obvious victims to this point of history are the slave masters themselves, deceived in their traditions and society, and forced to deceive themselves in order to deny the obvious humanity of their "property."  Michael Fassbender's Epps is a cruel and brutal man who has any slave who picks less than 200 pounds of cotton a day receive a whipping, and he is infatuated with his slave Patsey, who, as his property, he forces himself upon, but cannot admit his affection because she is his "property," but his affections are not unnoticed by his acid-tongued wife, who takes much of her jealousies out on Patsey.  One plantation overseer talks about the emotional toll of being the whipman, and even some of these white folk feel trapped within the institution.
Chiwetel Ejiofor, a British actor best known as the ruthless Operative in SERENITY and various supporting roles in a few other movies, plays Solomon as a man suppressed by his environment, where any word can bring startling consequence, while seething in his suffering underneath, opposite Fassbender, who plays his role as the cruel slave master similarly, but at a 'boiling over' point, enraged by and totally accepting of the world around him.  Newcomer Lupita Nyong'o, a Mexican-born Kenyan actress in her feature debut, is the standout performer of the film though, in the difficult role of Patsey, the unfortunate victim of her master's affections, and by default, her mistress' rage.  Her demure tolerance in seeming hopelessness is tragic and impressing, claiming the place of the most sympathetic character in a film filled with sympathetic characters.
The film is not all suffering though, and there is much beauty of the Southern landscape juxtaposed against the ugliness of slavery, but when the genuinely good people come along, such as Brad Pitt's (who also produced the film) Samuel Bass, a Canadian abolitionist who stands up to Epps, it's refreshing and matters all the more against the despair, so you can't even care that someone as recognizable as Brad Pitt is suddenly in this movie.

You've probably heard about how "hard to watch" this film is because of its depictions of cruelty, and it's true that McQueen doesn't succumb to squeamishness, but I think that only makes it more important to see.  Recently on NPR, in an interview with McQueen and Ejiofor, I heard it said that we love to be the country that freed the slaves, but were not so ready to acknowledge that we were also the country that needed to free the slaves who made up the largest slave industry in the world.  It's crucial that we know our history, the good and the bad, and if we ignore the evils of such institutions or simply downplay them, we can lose the importance of the goodness.  12 YEARS A SLAVE isn't really a very graphic movie, but it is brutal and it should be.  It's a movie that does not let you forget that this was reality, and people were lynched, tortured, families separated and innocent victims were penalized in ways that we aren't comfortable doing to animals.  I would consider this reasonable viewing for kids around 13 or 14, not because it isn't horrific, because it can aptly be described as 'horrific' but it isn't exploitative or excessive.  It's an honest depiction of our history, a nationally-defining history, and it's a more visceral and educational way for kids to learn than from the clinical but comfortable textbooks at schools.  Most of it is stuff that we all know about loosely, but rarely acknowledge fully, but should.  People cannot afford to excuse these events.
It's incredible to think that for something so significant in our history, American slavery has never had a very solid  presence on the cinema screen, often making cameos in historical epics, and during the Golden Age of Hollywood, it was often romanticized.  One of the most important movies of all time, D.W. Griffiths' THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915), the first use of many classic cinematic techniques and often considered the first cinematic epic, not only romanticized slavery, but glorified it wholeheartedly and climaxed with the first ride of the Ku Klux Klan, founded by the film's heroes to stop the freed slaves from violated their white women.  Over the years, film has managed to evolve past the ultra-racist and ridiculously inaccurate portrayals of our most shameful history, but until recently, any attempts to bring an honest and realistic story of slavery to the big screen have been unsuccessful.  Even Steven Spielberg, the master filmmaker who so successfully brought the Holocaust to the public eye in SCHINDLER'S LIST was unable to do the same for slavery in his only-intermittently successful AMISTAD (1997).  Last year, master filmmaker of a sensationalist sort, Quentin Tarantino made the excellent DJANGO UNCHAINED, which aptly depicted the brutality of American slavery, but without much concern for realism, a la Tarantino.  Until 12 YEARS A SLAVE, there has not been a realistic, intimate and comprehensive, not to mention fact-based, account of slavery in the antebellum South made with such potency and craft.  Currently, it is far and away the strongest contender for the Best Picture award at next years Academy Awards, and if that stays, that also makes it the strongest contender for Best Director, which would make Steve McQueen the first black winner of the Best Director Oscar.  Additionally, it is also likely to receive nominations for Best Actor (Ejiofor), Best Supporting Actor (Fassbender), Best Supporting Actress (Nyong'o), Best Costume Design, Best Cinematography and Best Original Score.  If you have the stomach for your own history, or even if you don't, I highly recommend 12 YEARS A SLAVE, and if you don't think its issues are still relevant today, perhaps you haven't noticed the disproportionate poverty and crime rates among predominantly black communities who continue to suffer the aftershocks of a history that placed them under the foot of another population for our first decades and continues to speak to our culture.