Solomon Northup is an upstanding citizen of Saratoga Springs, New York. He lives in a fine home, wears nice clothes, and walks as though he owns the streets across which his polished shoes carry him. Fellow citizens smile and greet him as he goes, and he grins back and tips his hat. A fiddle player of considerable talent, he’s in demand, which enables him to provide for his lovely wife and two children, who also wear fine clothes and polished shoes.
But Northup doesn’t live in modern day Saratoga Springs; it’s 1841, and Northup is a black man, albeit one born free. Two men offer him a job performing with a circus that will travel to Washington, D.C., where slavery is legal. While in the U.S. capital, his “employers” drug him and sell him to a slave trader, claiming he’s a fugitive. To make sure Northup goes along with the ruse, the trader ruthlessly beats him.
Following a harrowing journey to New Orleans, Northup is sold to a planter named William Ford, who treats his slaves kindly. Ford runs into financial problems, however, and sells Northup to John Tibaut, a carpenter who treats him with unfettered cruelty, at one point beating him for using the wrong kind of nails. When Tibaut goes to whip him another day, Northup grabs the leather cord and thrashes his master instead. He’s not killed only because Tibaut still owes Ford money for the purchase of Northup.
Circumstances then bring Northup under the ownership of Edwin Epps, a man whose harsh treatment of his slaves makes Tibaut’s whippings seem like the hand of mercy. Northup spends the next ten years enduring this man’s harsh treatment.
How Northup came to write his memoir, titled “12 Years a Slave,” I’ll leave for you to discover. I’m just hesitant to recommend the experience.
The age of slavery in the U.S. is filled with as many stories as there were slaves and slave owners, and “12 Years a Slave” is one of the more remarkable I’ve encountered, given what Northup survived. As a movie directed by Steve McQueen and performed by a cast of actors including Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, and Garrett Dillahunt, his story comes across as a powerful tale of survival.
Visually, McQueen shoots the old South like it was an idyllic paradise blanketed with fields of white cotton and cut by smoothly flowing rivers flanked by moss-draped trees. The environmental hardships slaves surely endured are not on display, perhaps to avoid undercutting the brutality of the slave masters.
And how very brutal they were. Likewise, McQueen’s rendering of their violence is uncompromising. The whippings surpass the graphic nature of the beating of Jesus in “The Passion of the Christ,” and there’s a scene in which Northup hangs from a noose, his feet barely touching muddy ground and keeping him from choking to death. McQueen holds the shot for an excruciating length of time, long enough to make me swallow from feeling the noose tighten around my own neck.
The actors inhabit these roles as though they had gone back in time and talked with the men and women they portrayed. Ejiofor had the benefit of Northup’s words, but how was Fassbender able to sink so believably into the role of Epps and create one of the most despicable humans to grace a movie? One can imagine the emotional cost of inhabiting such detestable skin for weeks on end while shooting scenes that undoubtedly broke the actor’s heart.
But as I watched, I wondered why the dialogue sounded so theatrical, as though it had been written for the stage instead of
the screen. Each time a slave uttered a grandiose and grammatically perfect line, instead of saying something more natural and appropriate to the time and place, I wondered what McQueen was doing. Suggesting slaves were intelligent people undeserving of their fate? Perhaps. But it took me out of the movie.
“12 Years a Slave” also drags in the middle like an over-
weight dachshund. At one point, there’s a lengthy close-up
of Ejiofor looking into the distance. After a minute or so,
he looks into the camera for a
few seconds, as if to share a moment of empathy with the audience, which has been with him every step of his journey. It’s an artful shot, but also an example of the languid pace at which the movie moves. It tried my patience.
Even stranger was my emotional response to the ending. It was less than it should have been. Was that my fault or McQueen’s? I don’t know.
Still... I can’t deny the compelling nature of this story or the performances of its actors. “12 Years a Slave” is a heartbreaking and occasionally gripping look at inhumanity and the strength some have to survive it. I’ll never forget, but I can’t recommend it for everyone.
Three-and-a-half stars out of four. Rated R for violence, cruelty, nudity, and sexuality.