Two men labor on sweltering a Louisiana
afternoon, planing wood and hammering nails into an small unfinished
building. To their own eyes, they are equal; sharing conversation and
stories of their lives. But equal they are not; one a free white man
working for wage, the other a black man in bondage, working simply
because it is what he was sold to do. “Your story is amazing,”
the free man says to the slave. “And in no good way.” That really
is the most essential way to describe the incredible true story of
Solomon Northrup, who was kidnapped from his home and family to be
sold into slavery. Based on Northrup's 1853 memoir, Steve McQueen's
12 Years a Slave stares unblinking into arguably the darkest
chapter of the United States' history, making a case for itself as
the definitive American horror story.
In 1814, still 59 years before the
Emancipation Proclamation, Solomon Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) lives
as an upstanding citizen in Saratoga, NY – an atypically
progressive community for its time. A gifted violinist by trade and a
decent man by nature, he is free and proud to walk the streets with
his family, wearing his finest clothes, frequenting the finest shops,
sheltered from common bigotry by his respected status. But this dream
existence proves to be just that: a dream – one from which he
awakens in shackles, alone and confused in a cold, dark cell. Daring
to insist to his captors that he is free man and justice shall be
done, he is flogged, menaced, and stripped of his identity along with
his bloodied shirt. He is Solomon Northrup no more. He is a “Georgia
runaway” by the name of Platt, or so he must pretend if he wishes
to survive his waking nightmare.
The verbal and visual metaphors of John Ridley's eloquent screenplay do not beat around the bush in likening the slaves to livestock, bluntly advertized as “fine beasts” by a particularly shrewd and unfeeling slave trader played by Paul Giamatti. It is he who first sells Solomon to Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), a fair and compassionate plantation owner who appreciates the value of Solomon's education. It's enough to make us momentarily forget that even kindly slavers are still slavers, making business decisions that irreparably destroy lives, profiting from a system wherein acts of cruelty have become the norm. In the case of one near-lynching, McQueen illustrates with unnerving restraint the indifference felt on both sides of the racial divide, conveying how deeply embedded the evil of slavery is in this place.
Solomon's odyssey becomes more tortuous
yet as he is passed into the hands of Edwin Epps, whom Ridley and
McQueen make plain is the true animal. They have Epps – a drunken,
violent, sadistic man – literally rolling with swine at one point.
His wickedness might seem cartoonishly over-the-top were it not for
Michael Fassbender's artfully unhinged performance. His mouth may
spew empty “truths” from the Bible to justify his immorality, but
his eyes suggest an even more deep-seeded self-loathing that
manifests itself in every heinous whipping, rape, and act of
psychological abuse. The layers of Fassbender's work reveal Epps to
be not a monster, but a human being, and that's the most frightening
thing about him.
It's unsurprising then that his
favourite slave, a young woman named Patsy (Lupita N'yongo), would be
his most victimized. Helpless against not only his paranoid rages,
but those of his venomously jealous wife (the excellent Sarah
Paulson), Patsy could easily have become an object of misery porn.
And yet McQueen and N'yongo are too tactful to let that happen, so
the severity of Patsy's suffering is carefully paced and revealed in
silence, up until the film's most brutal set piece.
True to the aesthetic characterized by
his first two features, Hunger and Shame, McQueen
effectively employs long single takes for harrowing sequences like
these. Whether allowing the camera to linger on an unsettling tableau
or shifting from face to face in the same tracking shot, McQueen and
his director of photography Sean Bobbit develop a visual language for
12 Years a Slave that manages to objectively confront the
matter-of-fact-ness of these scenes while also exploring their
emotional breadth. The audience can only sit transfixed in appalled
silence at the atrocities on display.
Such attention to detail extends to all
corners of this production, including Patricia Norris' costumes, Adam
Stockhausen's sets, Joe Walker's editing, and especially Leslie Shatz
and Ryan Collins' intricate sound design. Simple yet distinctive
sounds – a violin string being tightened, the crack of a whip, a
prolonged wail of anguish – take on subtextual meanings as they
penetrate the drone of wind sifting through the cotton plants, or
bleed from one scene into another.
And at the centre of it all, holding
our gaze when we'd rather not watch, is Chiwetel Ejiofor. He delivers
a haunting portrayal of an intelligent yet crucially naïve man; a
man once blissfully blind to the plight of his race until he is
dragged through all nine circles of hell in chains, losing something
even more irreplaceable than twelve years of his life in the process
(even if the film doesn't quite adequately convey that passage of
time). There could be no happy endings to this story, even in
salvation. Solomon may regain his name, but never again can he truly
become the man he was before. His ordeal truly was amazing, and it
was truly in no good way.
**** out of ****
