Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is the rare prestige picture that earns every prize it won. It took Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay for John Ridley and Best Supporting Actress for Lupita Nyong’o, and it did so without a single scene built to flatter the audience. It is 134 minutes long, and it does not let you look away once.
Trailer, via SearchlightPictures.
The Man Who Was Free
The film adapts Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir. Northup was a free Black man living in upstate New York, a violinist with a wife and family, who was kidnapped in Washington, D.C. by two con men in 1841 and sold into slavery. He was worked on Louisiana plantations for twelve years before he got out.
Chiwetel Ejiofor plays him, and the performance is the film’s spine. Ejiofor gives Northup a watchfulness that never turns into surrender. He is a man trying to stay alive and, harder than that, trying to keep his dignity while everything around him is designed to strip it.
The Owners
McQueen and Ridley are careful about the men who hold Northup. Benedict Cumberbatch plays William Ford, whose kindness is real and useless. Michael Fassbender plays Edwin Epps, and Fassbender makes him a coherent human being rather than a monster, which is far more frightening. Sarah Paulson’s Mary Epps is as cruel as her husband and smarter about it. Paul Dano’s John Tibeats is the petty overseer who cannot stand being outworked by the man he owns.
The point of this casting is that slavery did not need villains to run. It needed ordinary people and a system.
Patsey
Lupita Nyong’o plays Patsey, the enslaved woman Epps fixates on, and her scenes are where the film stops being history and becomes something you carry out of the theater. Nyong’o won the Oscar for it. She deserved it. The performance has no self-pity in it, which is exactly why it is unbearable.
How McQueen Shoots It
McQueen holds his shots. The film was made on four historic antebellum plantations in Louisiana, and the camera treats those grounds with a stillness that makes the violence in front of it worse. There is no music telling you what to feel and no cutaway to spare you. That patience is the whole method.
It is also why the film cannot be called entertaining, and should not be. McQueen is not interested in catharsis. He wants you to sit in it.
The Ending Is Not a Rescue
Northup’s way out comes through a chance meeting with a Canadian abolitionist, played by Brad Pitt. The film is honest that this is luck, not justice. Twelve years were taken and nobody gave them back. The last stretch of the film is not a triumph. It is a man returning to a family that has aged without him.
Where It Falls Short
The one weakness is the same as its strength. A film this controlled can feel like an exhibit at times, and there are stretches in the middle where the shape of the story goes slack. Northup’s own agency is thin by design, because the memoir is about endurance, but the film could have let him act more than it does.
Those are small complaints against a film that made $187 million on a $22 million budget and was named the best film of 2013 by more critics than any other. It is the definitive American film about slavery, and it got there by refusing every shortcut.
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