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12 Years A Slave (Film Review)
Jan. 19th, 2014 08:57 amThis was released in Germany on Thursday, and I had the chance to watch it yesterday. Well, now I know what to root for at the Oscars, and no, not for social justice reasons - because it truly is an amazing movie in terms of direction and acting. Chiwetel Ejiofor, who had first come to my attention playing the Operative in Serenity, is fantastic in it, and needs to be, because the movie doesn't use voice overs or expositionary dialogue/monologues to tell us how Solomun Northup feels about the horrors he experiences and witnesses. It doesn't need to. Ejifor's body language and facial expressions convey so much, and the film trusts him to do it. (The closest it comes to a "verbalized discussion of feelings" scene is one between Solomon and fellow slave Eliza (Adepero Oduye) about their loss of their respective children.) Same goes for the rest of the cast, btw: and I do hope Lupita Nyong'o, who plays Patsey, gets that supporting actress Oscar.
Film aesthetic wise, director Steve McQueen makes the Southern landscape extraordinarily beautiful, which of course makes for a harrowing contrast to what goes on there. (Reading up interviews, I saw him saying he was inspired by Goya's paintings with this contrast of beauty and awful events, and I can see that.) By contrast, you don't see much of New York (where Solomon comes from - there are just enough scenes to make it clear what his background as a free man of colour is) and Washington, DC (where he's kidnapped), although there is one shot which makes a maybe obvious but necessary point in the later: the camera moves from the pin the kidnapped Solomon is kept at upwards through the house until you see the mid 19th century Washington city skyline - and above all, the White House in the background. Slavery isn't treated as an American-Southern-States-only circumstance in this film, but as an American one.
There have been at least two articles about one particular aspect that struck the reviewers as new, in terms of cinematic and tv depiction of slavery and/or the South at any era, and having seen the film now, I found them particularly noticable, too: the way the two wives of the plantation owners, Mistress Ford and Mistress Epps (played by Sarah Paulson of American Gothic fame), are characterized, as fully and actively a part of the slavery system, as guilty as the male characters. (Instead of the film trying to equate being a (white) woman and being a slave, or showing the female white characters as more sympathetic or compassionate than the males.)
( Some spoilers from this point onwards )
Film aesthetic wise, director Steve McQueen makes the Southern landscape extraordinarily beautiful, which of course makes for a harrowing contrast to what goes on there. (Reading up interviews, I saw him saying he was inspired by Goya's paintings with this contrast of beauty and awful events, and I can see that.) By contrast, you don't see much of New York (where Solomon comes from - there are just enough scenes to make it clear what his background as a free man of colour is) and Washington, DC (where he's kidnapped), although there is one shot which makes a maybe obvious but necessary point in the later: the camera moves from the pin the kidnapped Solomon is kept at upwards through the house until you see the mid 19th century Washington city skyline - and above all, the White House in the background. Slavery isn't treated as an American-Southern-States-only circumstance in this film, but as an American one.
There have been at least two articles about one particular aspect that struck the reviewers as new, in terms of cinematic and tv depiction of slavery and/or the South at any era, and having seen the film now, I found them particularly noticable, too: the way the two wives of the plantation owners, Mistress Ford and Mistress Epps (played by Sarah Paulson of American Gothic fame), are characterized, as fully and actively a part of the slavery system, as guilty as the male characters. (Instead of the film trying to equate being a (white) woman and being a slave, or showing the female white characters as more sympathetic or compassionate than the males.)
( Some spoilers from this point onwards )
