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| Fassbinder and Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave. |
«««« 12 Years a Slave. Written by John Ridley, based on the memoir by Solomon
Northup. Directed by Steve McQueen. At selected theaters.
There are a lot of things Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave isn't. It isn't self-consciously hip, like Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained. In its unstinting portrayal of plantation slavery in the southern US, it isn't easy to watch. Yet despite the multiple scourgings, hangings, rapes and other indignities it portrays, it never feels exploitative, never indulges in Gibsonian pleasure of self-flagellation. What it is, in fact, is the most compelling treatment of its subject since Roots---and maybe longer.
The "hard to
watch" part deserves emphasizing. Based faithfully on the real-life memoir
of Solomon Northup, a free black from Saratoga, New York, Slave withholds none of the horror as it shows the enterprise of human
trafficking that operated in the antebellum period. Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor)
is an educated family man, and a talented musician, who is lured to Washington
D.C. in 1841 on the promise of a job. After a night of hard drinking, he wakes
up in chains. Protesting that he is a free man, he is savagely beaten, and
informed that he is an escaped slave from Georgia. His past is erased, and his
name changed. Before long he's smuggled out of Washington into the deepest of
the Deep South, where he languishes as a field slave for a dozen years.
One of
the film's most trenchant images, among many, is of Northup crying for help
from a basement cell as McQueen's camera rises to reveal the incomplete U.S.
Capitol building. There, in one shot, is the essence of what became Martin
Luther King's message more than a century later: that slavery was not just
immoral, but a standing indictment of a nation that failed too long to uphold
its own ideals.
Nigerian-descended
Briton Ejiofor (Children of Men, Redbelt) is terrific as a man too busy
holding together the tatters of his dignity to think about vengeance. At no
point does he not command the screen, even in the presence of a powerhouse cast
that includes Michael Fassbinder, Paul Giamatti, Benedict Cumberbatch and Brad
Pitt. No doubt his performance will make him a major star. Also notable is Lupita
Nyong'o's performance as Patsey, as a girl who discovers the consequences of
being the object her master's guilty desires. To Northup's enduring stoicism,
Nyong'o is a bare nerve, delighting in her little privileges as strongly as she
suffers their costs.
But
make no mistake: the real revelation here is the British-born McQueen. His
best-known previous work, 2011's Shame,
had its moments, but gave no hint of what he was capable of. From start to
finish, 12 Years is the work of a
director in complete control, tightening his hold on his audience like Solomon
Northup tightening the strings on his violin. To perpetuate the metaphor, the
film feels like a recital by a master soloist, staged in a spare room for just
a small audience. Over 133 minutes, it unfolds with the logic of a terrible
theorem, never flinching from the results. By the time Pitt appears, playing an
abolitionist who excoriates Fassbender on the abomination of human slavery, it
feels not like a moralistic lecture from another century, but a long-denied
affirmation that 2 plus 2 does, in fact, equal 4.
Northup's
book was one of the better-known slave memoirs of the 19th century,
though its impact tends to be overshadowed today by Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel,
Uncle Tom's Cabin. Picking apart the
movie's portrayal of slavery would be hard, given that Northup's experience
was well-attested. Still, it is interesting that in the scene where Paul
Giamatti's character sells Solomon to his first "master", Northup is
sold for a price of $500, a considerable sum at the time that would be
equivalent to about $12,000 today. Rational folks making a $12,000 investment
today—or back then—rarely throw such serious money away on frivolous cruelties.
It's for that reason that the film is almost compelled to portray Northup's
last "owner", Fassbender's Edwin Epps, as a drunken lecher and sadist.
No
doubt there were slave owners who were insane. But in a way, this is letting
the institution of slavery off too easily. The deeper damage of all those
generations of slavery was not done by the occasional sociopathic master, but
by the regular, everyday institutionalization of human suffering. It wasn't
necessarily the whippings, but the slow wearing-down of dignity. Every night a
slave went to sleep in bondage, thankful to have his belly full of his owner's
food, was its own kind of beat-down.
But these are quibbles. 12 Years a Slave may well count as the definitive
movie about its subject for a long time. For an institution with such a
consequential legacy, that's saying a lot.
© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro
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