Movie Review: "12 Years A Slave"

"12 Years A Slave": B+.  Although I had heard that 12 Years A Slave was generating a lot of Oscar buzz and was based on the true story of a free black man who is kidnapped by slave traders, I was not that keen on seeing it.  I have never enjoyed watching filmed scenes containing a lot of violence and bloodshed, and the word was out that portions of this movie were over the top.  There was a particular scene in Django Unchained (another slavery-related film reviewed here on January 11, 2013) which turned my stomach.  Was it possible that the director of 12 Years, Steve McQueen, was trying to out-do Django director Quentin Tarantino?  When I later read that 12 Years won the revered Toronto International Film Festival's People's Choice Award, however, I decided to see it anyway.  Just before the movie started, a little old blue haired lady, accompanied by a middle age man who was probably her son, sat down in one of the handicap seats in front of me.  It was at that moment I told myself to cowboy up.  If Great Grandma can handle the gore, so could I.

The movie 12 Years A Slave is based on an autobiography written in 1853 by Solomon Northup, who is played by Chiwetal Ejiofor.  In 1841 Northup was a free black man living the good life in Saratoga Springs, New York with his wife and two young children.  The family is portrayed as upper middle class.  While the other members of his family are away, Northup accepts a temporary job as a violinist, and travels to Washington, DC with his two white employers.  One minute Northup is enjoying wine with dinner in the company of his new acquaintances, and the next thing he knows he is waking up in a cell, cuffed and chained to the floor.  He quickly and correctly surmises that he's being sold into slavery, and his truthful claims of being a free man are disregarded.  His captors begin to call him by the name Platt, presumably to lessen the chance of Northup's true identity being discovered before they can get him south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Almost all of the middle 90% of the story depicts life on the plantations.  After being transported by boat to Louisiana, the first plantation owner he serves, Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), is relatively humane, although some of Ford's white overseers are suspicious of Northup's intelligence and dignified air.  Unfortunately for Northup, Ford is indebted to another plantation owner, Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), forcing Ford to sell Northup to Epps in partial satisfaction of the debt.  Once Northup's transfer to the new owner is complete, things go downhill precipitously.

Fassbender's Epps is a powder keg waiting to explode.  One has to wonder what percentage of the slave owners were anything like him.  The movie shows in one scene after another how the southern whites looked upon the slaves as chattel.  Mothers are split from their children.  Slaves are flogged for minor shortcomings. The women are sexually abused.  At the end of each swelteringly hot day in the fields picking cotton, the slaves' output is weighed, and woe to those who don't measure up.  In one heart-wrenching scene, Northup is forced against his will to whip one of the female slaves.  Lynching is commonplace, no questions asked.

Given the fact that the story is based on an autobiography, we know Northup eventually finds freedom.  (We also could figure this out from the film's title.)  Perhaps that is the reason why the final act directly pertaining to this newly reacquired status is a short one.  Samuel Bass (Brad Pitt) plays a key role here, but his character is woefully underdeveloped.  I would have preferred more details regarding the attainment of freedom, as well as more of an explanation of the events that occurred when Northup was first captured by the kidnappers. 

12 Years A Slave is a good reminder that slavery was an incredibly sad but very real blemish on our country's history.  Although we might tend to think of slavery and the Civil War together, slavery went on for decades before the Civil War started in 1861.  Even to this day there are many historians who take the position that, leading up to the Civil War, the main dispute between the Union and the Confederacy was over the question of states' rights being usurped by the federal government.  Defending states' rights appears on the surface to be a noble cause, until we come upon the topic of slavery.  It is impossible to respect and defend any state law which legalized the practice.

As for the violence and bloodshed, McQueen could have toned it down a bit without waylaying the story's message.  Some of the violence does not make sense, such as the beating of the slave whose production was more than two times that of any of the others.  Why would a plantation owner incapacitate his best worker? Is it blood that sells tickets?  The film would have been a better one without so much of it, although maybe not as memorable.