Slave mastering – 12 Years a Slave doesn’t flinch

In theaters Friday: The Book Thief, Thor: The Dark World
New on Blu-ray: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Parkland

Though his artistic flare is tempered here by a newfound and unwavering focus on the strain of character and the boil of unrelieved tension, there remain several images within Steve McQueen’s striking new film 12 Years a Slave that provide pause, visual compass points for the director’s intentions.

There’s the slow camera pan up from a muck-bricked hovel that hoards kidnapped free men beaten and sold into slavery to reveal the U.S. Capitol building just a few blocks away.

There is the steamboat, so majestic on the horizon or splayed on our Louisiana postcards shown instead in extreme close-up. As it carries the story’s slaves southward, it might as well be descending into hell, the paddles of the stern wheel chopping at the dark Mississippi waters with violence, like long red blades hungry for a glut of unrighteousness.

There’s the camera lingering on the backs and shoulders of slaves dancing to their drunk master’s cat calls—their cross-hatches of whips scars and wounds covered only by the thin drapes of cotton picked by their own weathered hands.

McQueen’s motif is clear. Just out of sight, just under the surface or around the corner, something horrific is happening. The former painter and multi-media artist has made his young feature film career all about staring at the horrors of the world, things mainstream Hollywood runs from, and not blinking until his story is told, until we, the audience, have survived it and come out on the other side with, if not all the answers, at least better questions.

With 2008’s Hunger he examined the 1981 IRA hunger strike, the crippling Catholic-Protestant war and the atrocious conditions of Maze Prison. In 2011, Shame told the story of a successful young Manhattan-dweller struggling with a dark sexual addiction.

And in 12 Years a Slave he has the perfect bastion for racial injustice and human fortitude in Chiwetel Ejiofor, an English actor who portrays free man-made-slave Solomon Northup with powerful brown eyes that are wells so deep there’s room for whatever the audience wants to pour in there, too. For much of the film his owner is Edwin Epps, a vile specimen that McQueen regular Michael Fassbender brings into seething, blank-hearted being. Epps misquotes the Bible. He whips his slaves without mercy. He blames every ill that befalls his Louisiana plantation on the people he refers to only as “property.”

The film boasts at least a half-dozen memorable performances (Sarah Paulson’s cold-blooded Mistress Epps and Benedict Cumberbatch’s more sympathetic Ford are brilliant turns, though Brad Pitt’s late, deus ex machina appearance is too on-the-nose stilted), but does 12 Years a Slave say anything new about slavery? Not exactly, unless you count McQueen’s unflinching depictions of slave driver abuse as revelatory and not simply reminders in the most horrific sense of the word.

But here’s the thing. Did Saving Private Ryan say something new about World War II or the Holocaust? No. And yet it was a remarkable depiction of that conflict and an accessible portrait of humanity facing enormous adversity.

Let’s please move beyond this notion that just because a drama centers on the African American experience it has to reach some lofty level of supreme universality. That’s Hollywood money machine talking. The truth is, this didn’t have to be the slavery movie to end all slavery movies. It just had to be a powerful experience, and in every way possible, it is. Ironically, films about a bunch of white people are rarely held to such a standard and can instead revel in their own specificity. One of this year’s awards contenders is about a beardy folk singer that just loves his cat for crying out loud.

It is important to note that this marks the first time a black director has helmed a major motion picture about slavery in the American south, and not coincidentally, it’s a rare film that is based on a former slave’s personal account of his own experience. Northhup really existed, and after being returned to his wife and family, he spoke publicly in favor of abolition and even assisted others in their escape through the Underground Railroad. But it is a long, hard road to this bittersweet and rewarding epilogue.

Solomon’s journey did not break him, thankfully, but 12 Years a Slave just might break you. This could very well be the greatest film about American slavery ever made, but it certainly does not have to be.