Nine Oscar Nominations For 12 Years A Slave!

Initially 12 Years A Slave is a straight forward movie set in the Antebellum, a period much before the American Civil war in the United States when slavery was unchallenged. The movie, adapted by screenwriter John Ridley is based on a book of the same title written by Solomon Northup, a black man born free in New York State, tricked, drugged and kidnapped in Washington DC and sold into slavery. Chiwetel Ejiofor brings to the film an intense and incomparable performance as Northup. Lupita Nyong’o, a beautiful young woman, brings to the screen a passionate and defiant performance as a fellow prisoner named Patsey.

Director Steve McQueen’s previous films are Hunger (2008) and Shame (2011). Both films reflect the human situation in terms of loss and being trapped. There’s much emotional scathing in both McQueen’s films as the characters find themselves in a damaging, most psychologically difficult context. In 12 Years A Slave (2013) the lynching and beatings, the uncompromising brutality and psychological force are shocking, even more so when you realize that all of this didn’t just happen in the movie as one historical instance but instead was commonplace in the Antebellum South. One writer, affected by the constant use of the word ‘Nigger’ connects the word to the past, how its meaning and connotation were birthed in hate. In this film the word, portrayed in all it’s meaning brings out what the word actually does.

Actor Michael Fassbender has been an on-going collaborator with Director Steve McQueen in all of his movies so far, often playing the lead or a key character. In 12 Years A Slave, he plays Epps, portraying a sadistic slavemaster and brings to life the history of the time, an under-reported part of the system that used violence to override guilt. As you watch the movie and try hard to understand Epps and his abuse of Patsey, it eventually becomes apparent that he is in love with the young woman and is completely unable to understand it. He takes to drink and tries to destroy her. It’s hard to feel any sympathy for Epps, but he is desperate in his inability to understand his feelings and as the movie progresses, he becomes much more unstable adding to the fear and pain in Solomon Northup. The movie does portray some of the complicity that Solomon Northup is forced to be a part of along with his oppressors, but Chiwetel, who can only occasionally express himself, never looses the viewer’s sympathy. He is an educated, refined man, a man with a wife and children, a free man; his being in slavery is a grotesque mistake, a terrible injustice. We can see it clearly. But McQueen is making us see the point that they are all free. Or should be. They are all dignified human beings with families. Northup’s situation is an amplification and distillation of the whole crime.

12 Years A Slave has all of McQueen’s effortlessly powerful visual composition and emotion. In all his movies is the determination to look at ugly realities head-on. Chandradhar, an upcoming filmmaker in Hyderabad says that he sat down to this movie expecting to see one of the long, fixed-camera takes, McQueen’s Director’s Trademark. We get a superbly composed, continued shot of Solomon’s wondering face after a conversation with a wandering carpenter, played by Brad Pitt, and we see hope and fear and loss register with him, along with a new realization of all that he has endured. It is a bravura performance from Ejiofor and McQueen.

“I read this book, and I was totally stunned. At the same time I was upset with myself that I didn’t know this book. I live in Amsterdam where Anne Frank is a national hero, and for me 12 Years a Slave – a firsthand account of slavery read like Anne Frank’s diary but written 97 years before Anne Frank. I made it my passion to make this book into a film” – Steve McQueen, Director of Hunger and Shame, and now his third film nominated for nine Oscars –12 Years Slave