Every once in a long while a film comes along where seeing it can be considered not only essential, but practically a duty. Setting aside even the lowest tolerance for violence can be a relative small price to pay for the reward gained. In 12 Years A Slave, the mindless atrocities brought against American slaves in the pre-Civil South, is not merely shown, it’s brought to the screen with an artistry that puts the viewer squarely inside the shoes of the tormented.
British director Steve McQueen is interested in telling this based-on-a-true-story of a kidnapped formerly free black man unabashedly from the viewpoint of the slaves. The constant tension of what will happen next–the terrible uncertainty–fills the empty spaces McQueen leaves between his parade of harsh scene after harsher scene. The stillness between the sadism is the glue that brings the viewer in closer and closer. McQueen’s remarkable use of sound provides a jarring counterpoint to the haunting quiet that gives us time to reflect “How would I handle this? COULD I handle this?”
As Solomon Northrup, Chiwetel Ejiofor, in the year’s most impressive performance thus far, portrays shock, vulnerability, resilience and fear, often in the same scene. McQueen regular Michael Fassbender, as Ejiofor’s second slave owner, brings a new definition to insanity. Unabated grotesque cruelty knows no bounds in Northrop’s’ new world, yet McQueen’s overriding concern is that we experience it as if it were happening to us. With things this intense a catharsis is too much to hope for, but since we’re practically tied by an umbilical chord to Northrup, we come to identify with his strength against all odds. There may be a way out of the madness but only if Northrup continues ratcheting up his superior stamina, and even then, any deliverance of Northrup would be nothing short of a miracle.
Crumbling the likes of Gone With The Wind into la-la land shambles, McQueen, 43, has been here before. His film Hunger placed us inside the walls of a Northern Ireland jail full of abused IRA prisoners and inside the hunger strike of Bobby Sands’ fight to death. Subsequently he tackled a troubled sex addict’s voyage to an inner hell. With 12 Tear’s A Slave you won’t confuse him with Quentin Tarrantino anytime soon. Nor will you ever be able to watch any previously made film about slavery in quite the same way.