'12 Years a Slave' based on true story
He wakes up in a cold,
stark prison cell, with a spiderweb of chains shackling his arms and
legs. The traffickers have drugged him and are sending him down to
Louisiana, where he'll be sold into slavery. Gazing at his chains as if
he were in a bad dream he simply has to wake up from, the brilliant
Chiwetel Ejiofor places us right inside Solomon's skin, and instantly
we're sharing the horror this man's life has become. Ejiofor may have
the most eloquent eyes of any actor now working. They are orbs of pure
expression, and in this movie they need to be because Solomon can rarely
speak what he's feeling. What we read in his intensely private
thousand-yard stare is the agony of a man robbed of freedom, but also
the renunciation of despair. Whatever happens, he will persevere and
survive. He will know misery, but he will not fall into the trap of
madness. He will transcend.
Hollywood's black renaissance?
The scalding power of
McQueen's artistry begins with this: He uses the fact that Solomon
wasn't born into human bondage to draw us into the experience of
slavery. Solomon has to learn to answer insults or bear whippings with
silence, to pretend he's a toady who can't read or write, and the
cruelty of that process becomes the film's way of dramatizing the
unnaturalness of slavery. Is it just Solomon who's really a free man?
No, every slave is.
12 Years a Slave is based
on a book Northup wrote about his ordeal, and McQueen, working from a
superb script by John Ridley, has structured the film as a diarylike
series of incidents. There are no trumped-up arcs to pad out what we're
watching. The crushing reality of Solomon's day-to-day existence is all
the drama the film needs. Solomon's first slave owner (Benedict
Cumberbatch) reveals a few humane instincts — as much as a slave owner's
behavior can be called ''humane.'' But then, after showing too much
pride, Solomon gets sold off to Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), a
seething plantation owner who's a kind of diabolical psychologist of
sadism. He can see the fire in Solomon's heart and is driven to break
him. When he learns that Solomon has tried to get a white laborer to
send a letter north, he holds Solomon's face close, saying he knows
what's going on, and Solomon defuses the situation with an ingenious lie
that he must sustain for minutes on end, without a tremor, staring his
overseer right in his taunting eye. This is virtuoso filmmaking that
lays bare the degraded relationships with a terrifying intimacy.
Edwin has a consuming
obsession with Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o), the slave who picks more cotton
each day than any other slave (500 pounds of it) and whom he regularly
rapes. Their ''relationship'' becomes part of a debased triangle, since
Edwin's wife (Sarah Paulson) is aware of his fixation. Due to her
jealousy, and to Edwin's disgust at his own desires, Patsey is subjected
to the torments of hell. Lupita Nyong'o's performance is shattering.
She goes to a place of private terror and communion beyond pain. When
Edwin is whipping Patsey, McQueen plays a startling trick: He holds on
the image of Edwin brandishing the whip — a Hollywood cliché — and then,
as we're lulled into that familiar ''it's only a movie'' mode, the
camera, without a cut, spins around to show the obscene violence of the
whipping. The mortification of flesh hits us in the solar plexus.
It's Ejiofor's
extraordinary performance that holds 12 Years a Slave together. He gives
Solomon a deep inner strength, yet he never softens the nightmare of
his existence. His ultimate pain isn't the beatings or the humiliation.
It's being ripped from his family, blockaded away from all he is. 12
Years a Slave lets us stare at the primal sin of America with open eyes,
and at moments it's hard to watch, yet it's a film of such emotion that
in telling the story of a life that gets taken away, it lets us touch
what life is. Grade: A
