12 Years a Slave (2013)
Directed by Steve McQueen
In the pre-Civil War United States, Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York, is abducted and sold into slavery. Facing cruelty as well as unexpected kindnesses Solomon struggles not only to stay alive, but to retain his dignity. In the twelfth year of his unforgettable odyssey, Solomon’s chance meeting with a Canadian abolitionist will forever alter his life.
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56 films that influenced 12 Years a Slave
What critics say influenced 12 Years a Slave
Here is an endeavor so brutal, so honest and stirring, that it inspires a collective pause akin to what “Schindler’s List” did for the subject of the Holocaust.
While Epps isn't written with much more depth than Django Unchained 's flamboyantly cruel Calvin Candie, Fassbender imbues him with a mercurial mania that's more reminiscent of Ralph Fiennes's Amon Goeth in Schindler's List.
I’m tempted to compare 12 Years a Slave to Schindler’s List, but that would be wrong, because there are far fewer films about slavery than there have been about the Holocaust.
The film, directed by British filmmaker Steve McQueen, has been compared to Schindler’s List, a comparison that, in some ways, does it a disservice.
It's easy to compare McQueen's movie to Spielberg's "Schindler's List" and how it portrayed the Holocaust, but in this case "12 Years a Slave" seems somewhat dangerous in its efforts to stir up a long dormant blemish on our own country's past and one wonders why anyone would want to experience that period in the graphic way it's portrayed here.
The starkness and the realism of “12 Years” even makes films like Steven Spielberg’s exemplary Holocaust drama “Schindler’s List” seem “Hollywood” in comparison.
With its villainous overseers, so free with the N-word, and its scenes of sadistic violence, "12 Years a Slave" inevitably recalls such previous and nakedly exploitative slave sagas as " Mandingo " (1975) and that film's sequel, "Drum" (1976).
One of the shocks of “12 Years a Slave” is that it reminds you how infrequently stories about slavery have been told on the big screen, which is why it’s easy to name exceptions, like Richard Fleischer’s demented, at times dazzling 1975 film, “Mandingo.”
Mandingo (1975) turned the subject into softcore cheese.
She’s like Falconetti in Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, going to a place of private craziness and communion beyond pain, to the point that Patsey begs Solomon to take her down to the river and drown her.
It may be that Americans of all races are still reluctant to confront this brooding historical specter that continues to haunt us, or want to engage with it only in the cartoon version presented by Quentin Tarantino in “Django Unchained.”
McQueen’s restrained, pictorial style contrasts with Quentin Tarantino’s revenge fantasy “Django Unchained,” about a freed slave who exacts bloody revenge on slaveholders circa 1858.
Whether or not it takes home any Oscars, 12 Years a Slave is necessary viewing that (as much as we loved it) puts last year’s Django Unchained to shame.
Based on the true story of Solomon Northup, a free black American who was kidnapped from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., in 1841 and sold into slavery, Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave,” written by John Ridley and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, is a necessary corrective to the antics of “Django Unchained,” not to mention “Mandingo” and its ilk.
It's how you spend 35 minutes hearing Christoph Waltz talk and talk in Django Unchained and get nervous that Quentin Tarantino momentarily forgot what his movie was called.
Despite its handful of vicious instances of violence, 12 Years has none of the garish extravagance of last year's Django Unchained, in which Quentin Tarantino perverted a historical atrocity into a hip-hop-scored spaghetti Western.
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These are among many moments reminiscent from past slavery productions, but "12 Years a Slave" does not engross to the level of seeing "Roots" for the first time, nor does it possess the grace or cinematography of the caliber of "Glory."
There’s deep violence in Northup’s violin’s snapped strings, not to mention the worst whipping scene ever captured on film—not even Denzel Washington’s runaway-slave whipping in “Glory” comes close.
Structurally, that’s not entirely unlike the dramatic problem you also find in films like Glory, which seem to think that the evils of prejudice would only be recognizable when viewed by a character introduced to these injustices for the first time.
Hollywood has produced plenty of historical dramas about race and racism (many dominated by white protagonists or major characters) from The Help to Glory.
Within some exploitation ideals (Africa Addio, the excellent Goodbye Uncle Tom), the brutality and terror were matched by a semblance of reality, but for the most part, Hollywood hates the idea of making a movie about what really happened.
An early scene in which slave trader Theophilus Freeman (Paul Giamatti) prods naked slaves for the benefit of prospective buyers offers an alarming yet in-no-way-arousing corrective to an equivalent sequence in the tasteless 1971 mock-doc “Goodbye Uncle Tom,” which lingers on the nudity and degradation of such a market.
With its villainous overseers, so free with the N-word, and its scenes of sadistic violence, "12 Years a Slave" inevitably recalls such previous and nakedly exploitative slave sagas as " Mandingo " (1975) and that film's sequel, "Drum" (1976).
But as Mel Gibson did with The Passion of the Christ , although to a lesser degree, he structures his film so that almost every situation works out like a mathematical equation the resolution of which is always some sickening outburst of physical abuse.
Sure, the (arthouse) audience is horrified, sure the (arthouse) audience gasps, but we’re in the territory of the most manipulative melodrama—not far from Mel Gibson’s graphic torturing of Jesus to stir the religious masses in his The Passion of the Christ.
Even Mel Gibson , whose unbearable 5-minute whipping scene in " The Passion of the Christ " set the standard for such graphic cinematic punishment, would be aghast if not envious of how British director Steve McQueen ensures that the audience palpably feels the flesh-ripping agony of every lashing and beating on screen.
And finally, Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ”, one of the highest grossing films of all-time, shows the labor of our sins fleshed out into the beaten skin of an honest man.
For comparable violence, you’d have to go to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.
I actually wish he had made it, if only to leave McQueen to do another, more personal project; failing that, the hope now is that the film's inevitable awards-season success (the rapes and whippings are decidedly tame compared to other church-group/book club-Bible study classics like The Passion of the Christ and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) means that someone as unbelievably gifted as McQueen will never have to be a gun for hire again.
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And besides, 12 Years a Slave gives Academy Award voters the chance to scratch an itch that’s been bugging them since the 1960s: It’s an opportunity to “atone” for the 1940 Best Picture winner, Gone With the Wind.
Hollywood movies may have come a long way since the days of Uncle Remus and of Mammy in "Gone With the Wind," but the tacit gentlemen's agreement not to press the issue - not to go too far in rubbing the South's face in it - has kept Hollywood reticent up to the present, much more reticent, say, than Germany has been about its Nazi past.
It's how we get romances — Jezebel, Gone With the Wind, Cold Mountain — that use the antebellum South and Civil War as backdrops but feature either the most entertaining black slaves or almost no slaves at all.
It will be impossible to ever look at “Gone With the Wind’’ the same way after “12 Years a Slave,’’ a brutally powerful and emotionally devastating film that takes great pains to rip any lingering vestiges of romanticism from America’s most shameful institution.
Through this story strand, 12 Years A Slave punctures the romantic myth, perpetuated by Gone With The Wind and its ilk, of the kindhearted slave-owner.
Adapting the memoir by Solomon Northrup, artist-turned-filmmaker McQueen (“Shame,” “Hunger”) and screenwriter John Ridley (“Three Kings,” “Red Tails”) seem determined to obliterate any lingering “Gone With the Wind”-inspired notions that the antebellum South was a place of grace and charm, or that slavery was, in the euphemism of the day, merely a “peculiar institution.”
One of the earliest — The Birth of A Nation (1915) — was actually pro-slavery!
In 1915, D.W. Griffith practically defined narrative moviemaking with The Birth of a Nation , which proudly celebrated the Ku Klux Klan’s reign over riotous, newly-freed slaves in America’s south.
No subject could speak more directly to the fractured racial foundation of the United States than this film does, while also bookending a century of American cinema that began when the fledgling silent-movie business was transformed by D.W. Griffith's racist 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation.