Directed by Steve McQueen
Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Micheal Fassbender, Lupita Nyong'o, Sarah Paulson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, Brad Pitt, Paul Giamatti, Adepero Oduye, Garret Dillahunt, Kelsey Scott, Bryan Batt
Rated R for violence/cruelty, some nudity and brief sexuality.
Nominated for 9 Academy Awards:
Best Picture
Best Director
Best Actor (Chiwetel Ejiofor)
Best Supporting Actor (Michael Fassbender)
Best Supporting Actress (Lupita Nyong'o)
Best Adapted Screenplay
Best Production Design
Best Costume Design
Best Film Editing
It's remarkable to think that such a historically significant book as Solomon Northup's 1853 memoir, Twelve Years a Slave, a searing and truth-based account of slavery in the Antebellum South in all its complexities and horrors, ever managed to fall into obscurity, but it did. For nearly 100 years. It was a best-seller in the 19th Century, selling thousands of copies alongside its more famous contemporary, Harriet Beecher Stove's Uncle Tom's Cabin. It wasn't until the 1960s that it returned to notability after it was rediscovered by Louisiana scholars and republished in a historically annotated edition. A PBS TV movie, Solomon Northup's Odyssey, brought further attention to it in 1984, but until just recently, with the release of this acclaimed independent film, it was still lesser known than you'd expect once you'd heard about it yourself.
The film, 12 YEARS A SLAVE, tells the story of Solomon Northup, as played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a skilled violinist and carpenter who lives in Saratoga, New York in 1841, with his wife and two children. His wife is going away with the children for the season as she does annually to work out-of-town, and while she's gone, Solomon is introduced to a pair of gentlemen professing to be proprietors of a traveling circus. They offer him a lucrative job playing violin for two weeks in their traveling show in Washington, but after a night on the town with the men, apparently having been drugged, Solomon awakens in chains in a dark room. Two strange men accuse him of being a runaway slave from Georgia, walloping him repeatedly with wooden paddles and whips when he protests that he is a free man from Saratoga. He's then taken down the Mississippi River in a steamboat, along with other wrongfully-captured black men, to New Orleans. Once there, he is given the identity of "Platt", sold in a slave market to the sympathetic plantation owner Reverend William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), and put to work under master carpenter John Tibeats (Paul Dano). Solomon curries favor with Ford, who even presents him with a violin, but he clashes with the sadistic Tibeats. Ultimately, Ford is forced to sell Solomon to a new owner to save him from the carpenter, but his new owner, Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), is a sadistic owner of a cotton plantation. Any slave who fails to meet a certain quota for cotton picked in a day is subjected to a flogging, and Epps's best worker, Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o) is the most unfortunate subject of his affections, victimized by her master's lust and her mistress's jealous wrath. Through 12 years, Solomon is forced to endure as the property of other men, suffering and witnessing to the indignities and cruelties of human slavery.
Ever since 12 YEARS A SLAVE first appeared on the film festivals circuit last fall, it was instantly acclaimed, rocketing to the position of Best Picture frontrunner from the start and still standing, albeit with some unexpectedly fierce competition. That primary competition is GRAVITY, a total opposite with a budget five times as large and a full-blown special effects-heavy action film. I think, however, that 12 YEARS will pull through to win the top prize on Oscar night. It will win less awards than GRAVITY, and GRAVITY will take the traditional Best Picture counterpart, Best Director. But 12 YEARS takes Best Picture. I like GRAVITY as a film better overall, but 12 YEARS is a great, and undoubtedly important film.
That's the real distinction of 12 YEARS, it's importance. It's easy to blow off "important" films as self-important, overly interested in themselves for their super-serious true life-based subject matters. But it's hard to discount the importance of a film like this; the first serious, seriously acclaimed, legitimized film portraying slavery in American history. It's hard to believe that a movie like this hadn't come along earlier. In fact, Hollywood's history, including many of the great landmark films, worked in the opposite direction, epics like THE BIRTH OF A NATION in 1915 and GONE WITH THE WIND in 1939, which not only depicted slavery inaccurately and romantically, but embraced a slavery culture as ideal! 2012's DJANGO UNCHAINED was an excellent movie that reintroduced slavery to mainstream cinema in a big, brassy and ridiculously controversial way, but it was as much or more about 1970s blaxploitation films as it was about historical slavery. 12 YEARS A SLAVE should be the "SCHINDLER'S LIST" of slavery, but it's impossible to tell about it right now. I don't think it is from where I'm standing now, but I have liked it a lot more with repeated viewings, so that's a good sign.
One award I'm pretty sure won't be going to 12 YEARS A SLAVE is Best Actor for British character actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, but if Tom Hanks' performance for CAPTAIN PHILLIPS isn't even in the running, I like Ejiofor's performance as Solomon Northup the best. Matthew McConaughey, however, is the frontrunner for that award for DALLAS BUYERS CLUB, and while I like McConaughey, and he just might be the most exciting actor working in Hollywood today, I don't think that's the movie for it. Ejiofor's intense and emotionally sobering performance is chilling, and is most deserving of the nominees this year.
Lupita Nyong'o, the first-time actress who plays Patsey, gives the best performance in the entire film though, tragic and shattering, bold and startling with total authenticity. She's up for Best Supporting Actress, and I don't think there's even a question about who should win, because she should win, however, Jennifer Lawrence has being making for some unexpected competition with AMERICAN HUSTLE. Lawrence is great, and if there were an Oscar for Best Celebrity Personality, she would be the shoo-in, but there just isn't enough weight her material to justify a win for Lawrence.
I'm not sure how long lasting its impact will be, given that it doesn't seem to be a big cultural touchstone, so it could take some time if it's going to build enough momentum to stand tall in the pantheon of film (I don't think any of the past several Best Picture winners will hold much clout in the decades to come, regardless of their qualities), but it is a very good film and my pick to win Best Picture.
 |
| Left to Right: Michael Fassbender as Edwin Epps, Lupita Nyong'o as Patsey, and Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon Northup. |
No comments:
Post a Comment