12 Years A Slave (Film Review)
Jan. 19th, 2014 08:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakThis 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.)
It's first apparant when Eliza, who has just been bought by Ford (as has Solomon) while her children were sold to other owners, is approached by Mistress Ford and you think the other woman will console her, but what Mistress Ford actually tells her is that "you'll forget your children in no time". In that moment, you get the entire dehumanization, and not because Mistress Ford is being intentionally sadistic: she clearly doesn't think of Eliza as a being different from, say, a cat whose litter has been given away, and who'll get over it and purr for the benefit of its owners. When Eliza doesn't do that and keeps sobbing through the services Ford, who is also a Baptist preacher, reads for his family and slaves, Mistress Ford decides she can't have someone that depressing around her and Eliza gets sold. The Fords, who need to think of themselves as good people and benevolent patriarchs as opposed to cruel exploiters, can't deal with Eliza puncturing that illusion.
Eliza is one of the two other slaves who get fleshed out in addition to our hero; the other is Patsey, whom he meets at the Epps plantation where he's sold to when he, too, is puncturing that illusion. Patsey has the most harrowing storyline of the movie, all the more so because you know as the audience that as bad as things get for Solomon, he will survive and eventually be free again - after alll, the title is "12 years as a slave", setting that limit. She's also the refutation to an argument I've seen made against the movie, that in focusing on Solomon it takes the way out Schindler's List taks re: the Holocaust - making the horror bearable to the audience by giving them the story of the few who escaped/survived, not the majority who didn't. Patsey doesn't get her freedom, and between Epps raping her and Mistress Epps (who because of her husband can't sell her or kill her, but can do anything else) punishing her for it, she endures a living hell. (BTW, the rape scene is filmed in an absolutely unexploitative way - the camera keeps being focused on the face of Patsey and Epps in close up, not showing their bodies until Epps leaves and you see Patsey - clothed - lying very still. The nudity, male and female alike, is elsewhere in the movie - when the slaves are sold, and there it's utterly unsexual, instead emphasizing the vulnerability of the slaves. Also, McQueen uses all kinds of body types, i.e. the women and men don't look like they came straight out of the gym but there are heavier male and female people as well.) The bond that develops between her and Solomon is the only good thing in her life, and when he is free again, that, too, is taken. Patsey is the representative of the slaves who did not ever experience freedom, and Lupita Nyong'o makes her almost a second lead of the film - it's only because Chiwetel Ejifor is so good that I don't write "she's the heart of the movie".
There is a third plantation owner's wife who is also a third black woman, and this is Mistress Harriet Shaw, played by Alfe Woodard. Her former owner actually freed her and married her (or is living with her as his common law wife - I'm not sure black/white marriage was possible in mid 19th century Louisiana, but she is adressed as Mistress Shaw by everyone). She only has one scene, but comes across vividly in it, as a pragmatist and survivor. "Where once I served, now others serve me", she says, and she has black servants (if I remember my Barbara Hambly novels correctly, free people of colour could own slaves in Louisiana), which muddies the water when it comes to black = victims, whites = oppressors, but on the other hand, she also is kind to Patsey and tries to help her. (That what worked for Harriet as a way out of slavery - using her owner's desire for her - can't possibly work for Patsey makes the advice she gives in vain, of course.) (With the Patsey and Mistress Shaw scene, the film also passes the Blechdel test, since they talk about Harriet Shaw and her story as well as about Patsey's situation.)
The various owners and overseers are played by prominent white actors - Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Fassbender, and in a brief role that would be decried as a stereotype if it didn't actually happen in the real Solomon's life, Brad Pitt, Paul Giamatti plus Garret Dillahunt (who since I just rewatched some Sarah Connor Chronicles episodes was weird to see) - but the movie uses them in an ensemble way - they're not given more prominence than their parts deserve, and deliver very good performances, too. Same goes for Sarah Paulson as Mistress Epps, who is absolutely chilling without ever becoming a caricature.
Solomon's reunion with his family - years later, which he'll never get back - reminds me of the last scene of Empire of the Sun, when Jim is reunited with his parents. In both cases, yes, there is the longed for reuinion, but also, in both cases, you feel that so much has happened to the main character, and his face shows it - that he can't go back to who he was, and there is only the hope that he and his family will find a new way to go forward. It is all the emotional release the film offers. And given the subject, it's justified.
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.)
It's first apparant when Eliza, who has just been bought by Ford (as has Solomon) while her children were sold to other owners, is approached by Mistress Ford and you think the other woman will console her, but what Mistress Ford actually tells her is that "you'll forget your children in no time". In that moment, you get the entire dehumanization, and not because Mistress Ford is being intentionally sadistic: she clearly doesn't think of Eliza as a being different from, say, a cat whose litter has been given away, and who'll get over it and purr for the benefit of its owners. When Eliza doesn't do that and keeps sobbing through the services Ford, who is also a Baptist preacher, reads for his family and slaves, Mistress Ford decides she can't have someone that depressing around her and Eliza gets sold. The Fords, who need to think of themselves as good people and benevolent patriarchs as opposed to cruel exploiters, can't deal with Eliza puncturing that illusion.
Eliza is one of the two other slaves who get fleshed out in addition to our hero; the other is Patsey, whom he meets at the Epps plantation where he's sold to when he, too, is puncturing that illusion. Patsey has the most harrowing storyline of the movie, all the more so because you know as the audience that as bad as things get for Solomon, he will survive and eventually be free again - after alll, the title is "12 years as a slave", setting that limit. She's also the refutation to an argument I've seen made against the movie, that in focusing on Solomon it takes the way out Schindler's List taks re: the Holocaust - making the horror bearable to the audience by giving them the story of the few who escaped/survived, not the majority who didn't. Patsey doesn't get her freedom, and between Epps raping her and Mistress Epps (who because of her husband can't sell her or kill her, but can do anything else) punishing her for it, she endures a living hell. (BTW, the rape scene is filmed in an absolutely unexploitative way - the camera keeps being focused on the face of Patsey and Epps in close up, not showing their bodies until Epps leaves and you see Patsey - clothed - lying very still. The nudity, male and female alike, is elsewhere in the movie - when the slaves are sold, and there it's utterly unsexual, instead emphasizing the vulnerability of the slaves. Also, McQueen uses all kinds of body types, i.e. the women and men don't look like they came straight out of the gym but there are heavier male and female people as well.) The bond that develops between her and Solomon is the only good thing in her life, and when he is free again, that, too, is taken. Patsey is the representative of the slaves who did not ever experience freedom, and Lupita Nyong'o makes her almost a second lead of the film - it's only because Chiwetel Ejifor is so good that I don't write "she's the heart of the movie".
There is a third plantation owner's wife who is also a third black woman, and this is Mistress Harriet Shaw, played by Alfe Woodard. Her former owner actually freed her and married her (or is living with her as his common law wife - I'm not sure black/white marriage was possible in mid 19th century Louisiana, but she is adressed as Mistress Shaw by everyone). She only has one scene, but comes across vividly in it, as a pragmatist and survivor. "Where once I served, now others serve me", she says, and she has black servants (if I remember my Barbara Hambly novels correctly, free people of colour could own slaves in Louisiana), which muddies the water when it comes to black = victims, whites = oppressors, but on the other hand, she also is kind to Patsey and tries to help her. (That what worked for Harriet as a way out of slavery - using her owner's desire for her - can't possibly work for Patsey makes the advice she gives in vain, of course.) (With the Patsey and Mistress Shaw scene, the film also passes the Blechdel test, since they talk about Harriet Shaw and her story as well as about Patsey's situation.)
The various owners and overseers are played by prominent white actors - Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Fassbender, and in a brief role that would be decried as a stereotype if it didn't actually happen in the real Solomon's life, Brad Pitt, Paul Giamatti plus Garret Dillahunt (who since I just rewatched some Sarah Connor Chronicles episodes was weird to see) - but the movie uses them in an ensemble way - they're not given more prominence than their parts deserve, and deliver very good performances, too. Same goes for Sarah Paulson as Mistress Epps, who is absolutely chilling without ever becoming a caricature.
Solomon's reunion with his family - years later, which he'll never get back - reminds me of the last scene of Empire of the Sun, when Jim is reunited with his parents. In both cases, yes, there is the longed for reuinion, but also, in both cases, you feel that so much has happened to the main character, and his face shows it - that he can't go back to who he was, and there is only the hope that he and his family will find a new way to go forward. It is all the emotional release the film offers. And given the subject, it's justified.
no subject
Date: 2014-01-20 09:26 pm (UTC)