There’s a striking moment in the beginning portions of Steve McQueen’s third feature 12 Years A Slave, based on Solomon Northup’s memoir of the same name: we see the protagonist, actually a free man who was kidnapped and now enslaved, sleeping with a woman in a dark room, and all we sense is anguish and desperation. The shot has two actors framed horizontally, and we cut to an image of Solomon sleeping with another woman, who we learn is his wife, framed vertically situated in a brightly lit idyllic space. We sense here that McQueen not only wants to show us the horrors of institutionalized slavery, but to show it with a certain amount of formal precision.
There are portions of the movie where we sense that McQueen is channeling Kubrick (especially the use of music at certain points), where his camera is a cold bystander, a witness to the horrific events. There are scenes where the film lets the poignancy of the situations truly come alive, like the stunning long take of the image where Solomon has been hung by the neck, barely managing to touch the ground with his feet, waiting for someone rescue him. It’s a disturbing scene in how the camera remains a calm and distant spectator, and it is remarkable how McQueen demonstrates the horrors of slavery in this single shot –Solomon isn’t somewhere isolated, but there are people around him, slaves going about their chores because that is all they can do –Solomon’s wait is for someone with authority to come save him.
But in spite of such moments, I, for one, couldn’t shake off the feeling that the ultimate point this film is making is rather a banal one, that slavery and racism were evil. Part of the banality is rendered by its principal antagonist, a sociopathic megalomaniac played by Michael Fassbender, who stands out as a one-note caricature that would have fittingly worked in a more cartoonish film like Tarantino’s Django Unchained, but in a reverential drama such as this one, he just doesn’t make an intriguing character. I wish the film had explored the other benevolent “master”, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who is human as opposed to the personification of distilled evil that is Fassbender’s Epps. Epps is polemically psychoanalyzed, and that to me reduced the impact of the scenes depicting Solomon’s misery. A lot has been said about how unflinching the film is in portraying the horrors experienced by Solomon Northup, but there are several moments in which I found McQueen’s style calling attention to itself, distracting the focus from the character’s plight.
Amidst all its moments of visceral impact and impressive narration, 12 Years A Slave is a customarily grim assertion of the obvious.
This entry was first published at MyTheatreCafe.com. Here’s the link: http://mytheatrecafe.com/review-12-years-a-slave
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