12 YEARS A SLAVE

Over the years, English director Steve McQueen has been exploring how people deal with imprisonment. His previous film, Shame, showed a man imprisoned by his own body, alternately embracing and rejecting his own impulses as they destroy him. His first film, Hunger, showed an emaciated Michael Fassbender as an IRA prisoner becoming questionably delusional fighting his imperialist wardens with an impractical, perhaps suicidal hunger strike. Unlike in Hunger the protagonist of his latest film, 12 Years A Slave, can't strike out no matter how much he wants to, and instead faces a slow and systematic damnation via his own sense of pragmatism.

The film is based on the memoir of the same name by Solomon Northup, a free black man who was drugged and kidnapped from his family before being sold into slavery in 1841. This sort of thing was fairly regular. Under the Fugitive Slave Act it was legal for bounty hunters to pursue runaway slaves into free states but many times it was easier just to grab any black man, say he was a runaway, and sell him for easy money. In this sense, Northup's story isn't that special, except for the fact that he happened to escape and be literate enough to tell his story well, and this film is all the better for recognizing how ordinary all these events were. Northup was well educated and made a nice living as a carpenter and violinist. The film seems to recreate this accurately, though it might overplay the contrast between his free life and slave life by suggesting that Northup, played in the film by  Chitwetel Ejiofor (Children of Men), didn't face any racial adversity as a free black man in Saratoga before being drugged by strangers.

When Northup wakes, he is told that he's now a runaway named Platt and is beaten within an inch of his life when he tries to assert his true identity. Early in his journey he finds himself on a ship paddling down the Mississippi, (the incessant thudding paddles suggest at the machinery of slavery as an industry). He knows that when the ship reaches its destination, he will be sold and he’s presented with the option to violently fight and face certain death or keep his head down and survive. He’s determined to do neither, but in the heat of the moment he knows that he must appear to accept his new life while searching for a way to escape.

We see that decision to be pragmatic slowly crush his spirit. After being sold to his first master, William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), he dares not reveal his identity but he looks to flash his intelligence so to be noticed. Ford probably senses that Northup isn't a runaway but is happy to have a useful slave. Any hope of being freed by Ford dies when he gifts Solomon a violin to "make the years pass more joyously." Furthermore Solomon's show of engineering skill earns him the ire of an overseer played by Paul Dano, who strings him up for hours from a tree just low enough that he might survive if he stands on his tip toes and doesn't slip in the mud. After a while his fellow slaves start to go about their business in the background. They don't speak up because there's no one to speak to, and because they would be punished for it. It's this pragmatism that literally keeps his life in danger in this scene that Northup must attempt in order to survive, one that McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley present as the central evil of slavery: the ability to force a person to accept his own suffering and ignore suffering in other people.

Things get worse when he's sold to Edwin Epps (Fassbender) who gives none of the limited regard Salomon might have enjoyed with Ford. Epps is a monster who frequently tortures his slaves under the guise of scripture when they fail to meet their quota and delights in frequently raping Patsy (newcomer Lupita Nyong'o), a female slave he professes to love but occasionally has whipped to keep his jealous wife happy. Patsy goes along with this at first because she hopes it will mean better treatment as a House Slave, and then because she has no choice. More and more Solomon must play himself down to survive, leading to a harrowing moment where, for very complex reasons he is forced to torture a fellow slave.

There's a lot of cruelty and McQueen plays it in his signature, matter of fact tone. But instead of removing us from it, the approach makes everything all the more horrifying.  Under both owners we constantly hear slaves being tortured either just out of frame or in the frame but just out of focus. He uses the images to emulate the blinders Northup and his fellow slaves must wear to survive. By showing just how casual an attitude slaves and owners have to the human suffering caused by the institution, it becomes a film of almost surrealistic horrors. Take the scene where Solomon is sold: We're in a posh, middle class home, Paul Giamatti and his perspective buyers dressed in the finest of fashion as the slaves stand around mostly in the nude, staring blankly, desplaying their teeth and muscles on demand, while Solomon is forced to play violin concertos to make it all feel more normal.

The performances are all excellent, all the principals throwing themselves into their parts with method like abandon without ever overwhelming the film, Fassbender and Nyong'o are particularly good and Ejiofor's performance avoids the Oscarbait traps of appearing overly noble.  This is a man who knows how vulnerable he is and that he's losing his soul day by day. Every attempt at defiance or escape he makes puts him in more and more danger. The fact that he does eventually manage it is so miraculous that it'll feel like Deus Ex Machina to some and in a way it is. Most people who entered slavery, either by birth or kidnapping, never escaped and the odds say that he should have died in bondage. But the reunion with his family feels hollow. We know that his only way out was, ultimately, to ignore the cries of others, knowing that to speak out could spell the end of his own tentative freedom. The real Solomon Northup spent the rest of his life working on the underground railroad, so it can't be said that pragmatism broke him, but in McQueen's film, it certainly compromises him.

Grade: A-