12 Years a Slave (15.)
Directed By Steve McQueen.
Chewitel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Lupita Nyongo, Benedict Cumberbatch, Sarah Paulson, Paul Dano and Brad Pitt. 135 mins
While criticising Tarantino’s Django Unchained Spike Lee said "American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust." This is something we all know yet have kind of forgotten. Whatever the historical outrage, if enough books, films and plays are made about it, eventually it becomes less of an incompressible moral affront and more of digestible melodrama, a distant cautionary tale. The achievement of 12 Years A Slave is that it claws away the century and a half of fine words, noble suffering and black hearted villainy to reveal the raw and excruciating pain beneath.
Its story is simple and self-explanatory. Solomon Northrup (Ejiofor) is a free man, married with two children, living in New York in the 1840s who is abducted taken to the South and sold into slavery. The drama is bluntly delineated. Northrup is a figure of pure good - smart, educated, compassionate and proud. His eventual master Epps (Fassbender) is pure evil – vicious, sadistic, hypocritical and ignorant. Half a century ago it might have been a vehicle for Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger.
What prevents this being some preachy, worthy (and thus worthless) melodrama; what makes it something vital and thrilling, is that Steve McQueen is a true film artist. Like his debut feature Hunger it operates in a middle ground between his background as a Turner prize winning video artist and conventional narrative cinema. The economy of his storytelling is striking – the nightmare of the steamboat journey south is conveyed with a close up of a churning steamboat paddle, a few dark interior scenes and some percussive noise. (This economy extends to Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack which is largely bits of his Inception score; which is one of the best movie scores of recent years.)
Of course you suspect that his style is in part forced by budgetary restraints but you don’t think about what you are not getting but the exactness of what you do get. His framing is immaculate, knowing exactly what needs to go onto that screen. It helps of course that he has performer as inspired as Ejiofor to point his camera at. Frame his face in a camera lense and he will invariably give you something extraordinary and often without the need for any dialogue. (The film is filled with ornate and elegant turns of phrase but for the most part the dialogue is just noise, a counterpoint to the brutality of the system.)
How does Chewitel do it? His extraordinary bulging eyes and quivering lips are formidable weapons but
12 Years is an extraordinary piece of cinema that has little in common with the liberal homilies that Hollywood employs to deal with this period. One little throwback though would be the parade of name of name white actors popping up in small roles which seems to hark back to the old tradition of actors appearing in films to register their support – it’s as if they say “Knee gar” five times to get absolution for their white guilt. Spoiler - the presence of Brad Pitt playing the white man who saves Northrup is particularly distracting.
Directed By Steve McQueen.
Chewitel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Lupita Nyongo, Benedict Cumberbatch, Sarah Paulson, Paul Dano and Brad Pitt. 135 mins
While criticising Tarantino’s Django Unchained Spike Lee said "American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust." This is something we all know yet have kind of forgotten. Whatever the historical outrage, if enough books, films and plays are made about it, eventually it becomes less of an incompressible moral affront and more of digestible melodrama, a distant cautionary tale. The achievement of 12 Years A Slave is that it claws away the century and a half of fine words, noble suffering and black hearted villainy to reveal the raw and excruciating pain beneath.
Its story is simple and self-explanatory. Solomon Northrup (Ejiofor) is a free man, married with two children, living in New York in the 1840s who is abducted taken to the South and sold into slavery. The drama is bluntly delineated. Northrup is a figure of pure good - smart, educated, compassionate and proud. His eventual master Epps (Fassbender) is pure evil – vicious, sadistic, hypocritical and ignorant. Half a century ago it might have been a vehicle for Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger.
What prevents this being some preachy, worthy (and thus worthless) melodrama; what makes it something vital and thrilling, is that Steve McQueen is a true film artist. Like his debut feature Hunger it operates in a middle ground between his background as a Turner prize winning video artist and conventional narrative cinema. The economy of his storytelling is striking – the nightmare of the steamboat journey south is conveyed with a close up of a churning steamboat paddle, a few dark interior scenes and some percussive noise. (This economy extends to Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack which is largely bits of his Inception score; which is one of the best movie scores of recent years.)
Of course you suspect that his style is in part forced by budgetary restraints but you don’t think about what you are not getting but the exactness of what you do get. His framing is immaculate, knowing exactly what needs to go onto that screen. It helps of course that he has performer as inspired as Ejiofor to point his camera at. Frame his face in a camera lense and he will invariably give you something extraordinary and often without the need for any dialogue. (The film is filled with ornate and elegant turns of phrase but for the most part the dialogue is just noise, a counterpoint to the brutality of the system.)
How does Chewitel do it? His extraordinary bulging eyes and quivering lips are formidable weapons but
12 Years is an extraordinary piece of cinema that has little in common with the liberal homilies that Hollywood employs to deal with this period. One little throwback though would be the parade of name of name white actors popping up in small roles which seems to hark back to the old tradition of actors appearing in films to register their support – it’s as if they say “Knee gar” five times to get absolution for their white guilt. Spoiler - the presence of Brad Pitt playing the white man who saves Northrup is particularly distracting.
