12 Years a Slave

#26 in my ranking of Best Picture winners at the Oscars.

This is a straight up horror film, and it’s remarkably effective. Adapted from the memoir by Solomon Northrup, Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is a terribly effective look at the contradictions, inherent inconsistencies of justice, and terrors of slavery. Well-anchored by every performance, the tale of Solomon Northrup’s capture and sale into slavery is told with such precision and clarity that it never feels less than truthful.

I ended up thinking of a couple of other Best Picture winners as I was watching this, Platoon and Argo. The former has the issue of trying to tell all of Vietnam in one grunt’s story, and the latter ended up elevating things too much for its own good. I say that because Northrop’s story kind of feels like the entire slave experience in one man’s narrative, and while the film can feel extreme, it never feels unnaturally elevated. I suppose part of it is helped by the fact that this takes place over a dozen years rather than the first few weeks of a year.

So, Solomon Northrop (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a free man living in New York with his wife and two children when he’s given the opportunity to join in on a touring group of musicians on a tour that will take them to Washington. He joins them, has a good and profitable time of it, and wakes up after the celebratory dinner to discover that he’s been captured and imprisoned with the accusation that he’s an escaped slave named Platt. There is no one for him to appeal to in the slave prison just within sight of the US Capitol building, and he and several others are sent to New Orleans where they are sold to William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch).

William Ford is what one might call a good slave owner. He treats his slaves well. He reads the Bible to them. And yet, as Eliza (Adepero Oduye) notes, Ford can obviously tell that Pratt is more than just a dumb slave, especially after he proves a waterway passable that Ford’s carpenter John (Paul Dano) had declared not so, and yet Ford is unwilling to do anything to discover Pratt’s history. He just views Pratt as choice stock. That waterway adventure, though, does more than show that Pratt is intelligent, it also embarrasses John to the point where he makes Pratt a target of his almost unlimited aggression, leading to an altercation where Pratt strikes back. Now, for all the horrors that follow, I think the most terrifying moment in the film is when John starts lynching Pratt, and Ford’s overseer stops it but does nothing to undo any of it while he waits for Ford to return. Pratt is left mostly hanging, just low enough so that he can dance on his tiptoes to keep himself from choking all while life returns to normal behind him, including children slaves playing in the background. It shows how normal this kind of action is, even under a good man like Ford.

In order to protect Pratt, Ford sells him to Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), and it’s a pale effort at that. Epps is something of a monster. He uses the whip whenever he can. He will only read passages from the Bible calling on people to be loyal to their masters. He’s having an open affair with Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), his best cotton picker, a situation that his wife, Mary (Sarah Paulson) cannot do anything to stop. He’s a bitterly cruel man who wakes everyone up in the middle of the night to dance for him while he’s drunk off his gourd.

Through all of this, Solomon Northrup must embrace the identity of Pratt just to survive. There are multiple conversations about the difference between surviving and living with Solomon wanting to live when he’s first taken and Pratt wanting to survive after years of being a slave. All of that is sold on Chiwetel Ejiofor’s face as he has to hide everything about him just to be able to live another day of picking cotton and getting whipped when he doesn’t pick enough. His existence is mostly hopeless, on a closed environment in Louisiana where his talents as a violinist can become a liability (he carves his family’s names into the base at one down point and must destroy it afterwards should it be discovered that he can read or write).

Why does one man experiencing all of this feel believable? Why does it never feel like McQueen went overboard in terms of the adaptation? Because the verisimilitude of the film is never in question. The cruelty of a slave owner against his property doesn’t require unbelievable events. It just needs some strips of leather, some rope, and post on which to strap Patsey.

A story where the main character has no agency is always an interesting one because that lack of agency has to be part of the point to work. Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Wrong Man was a similar exercise where the main character, accused of a crime he did not commit, was sent through the wringer of the legal system. His inability to make his situation better or worse on his own was the source of the horror, and Solomon Northrup’s entrapment in the persona of Pratt is similar in that he can only watch the terrors around him if he wants to hope for a sheet of paper, some makeshift ink, and a kind white person to help him.

All of this is anchored by the performances, mostly the core three of Ejiofor, Fassbender, and Nyong’o, the latter two of whom dominate the second half of the film. Ejiofor’s near constant state of fear is greatly realized. Fassbender’s cruelty to everyone around him is terrifying. Nyong’o’s movements from being something of a queen bee to a rape victim and mule and back are very strong, and it all is determined based on the whims of her master. When she begs Solomon to push her head under the water as an act of mercy, it’s easy to tell that it’s the call for help of a woman with no more hope.

12 Years a Slave is not a fun movie in any way, but it’s so well made, so affecting, and so well-acted that it becomes strangely watchable in its depictions of human cruelty. Perhaps there’s some solace in that Solomon got something of a happy ending in the end, so there’s a less melancholic ending we’re working our way towards, making it feel less like endless torture than it could have been. Still, the overall effect is incredible.

Rating: 4/4