12 Years a Slave Review

After the provocative, gripping, emotionally draining Hunger, and the mordant, pessimistic, emotionally draining Shame, you’d think Steve McQueen and regular muse Michael Fassbender would like to work on something fluffier, and far less misanthropic. Instead they’ve made 12 Years a Slave, a film which makes their earlier collaborations look like Pixar’s depiction of Utopianism.

Emotionally draining isn’t really an appropriate description for 12 Years a Slave. It’s more like thrusting your faith in mankind through a meat grinder and then having Bruce Forsyth make a joke about it on national television.

The story of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is indomitably tragic; a free man, with relative wealth and a loving family, he’s duped and kidnapped by two ‘entertainers’. He finds himself in chains and traded from plantation to plantation through America’s barbaric South for twelve years before realising his freedom.

One of its greatest strengths is its humble presentation. For all its abhorrent imagery and zealous inhumanity McQueen, significantly, never overdoes it. It’s categorically uncompromising, yes (one scene will make sure you never think about ‘getting lashed’ in the same way again), but it never feels heavy-handed or ham-fisted because every set-piece and each line of dialogue contributes to the progression of the narrative. Its message is of course obvious, but it doesn’t feel like a lecture; there are no eye-rolling, throwaway lines like ‘but it’s just not fair!’ The pathos functions the story, rather than the gauche inverse. For a film dealing with a subject of such substantial importance it’s tremendously difficult to avoid some hint of contrivance, something even Spielberg couldn’t avoid in Schindler’s List, so McQueen really is to be applauded.

Secondly, its arresting cinematography is at once desolately beautiful and frighteningly lurid. It’s as if Terence Malick photographed a horror film. It’ll cut from a vivid tracking shot, brimming with greens and yellows, through the Georgian swamp, to a framed close-up of Solomon’s hallowed, greyed complexion. One of the film’s most disturbing sequences involves Solomon, about to be hung from a tree, standing on his toes and spluttering and gargling in the most grotesque manner, while the rest of the slaves go about their daily routine; as he wheezes gutturally children laugh and play not twenty yards behind him.

McQueen also makes effective use of motifs throughout. An opening scene sees a jovial Solomon play fiddle with a triumphant smile at a dance in Saratoga, his hometown. Ninety minutes later the scene mirrors itself with Solomon as a slave; this time, there is only the look of forlorn despair. Music is frequent, whether it’s gospel singing while picking cotton or soundtracking a slave sale with a violin. Music is the slaves’ escape from the insufferable truth of their existence, their last form of expressionism and individuality, the last beacon of their selfhood.

Ejiofor, like McQueen, is excellent because he downplays Solomon. He is afflicted by sorrow, fear and disgust but in understating himself he provides his performance with a covert power, so that when Solomon does explode with frustration it is totally beguiling. It’s a master-class in body language; each forsaken glance, each anxious hunch develops Solomon into a character we are utterly immersed in. Benedict Cumberbatch and Brad Pitt are serviceable figures of twisted compassion towards Solomon, while Paul Dano, Paul Giamatti and Sarah Paulson are detestably malicious racists, and damn good at it. The highlight however is invariably Michael Fassbender in what is genuinely one of the best performances I’ve ever seen in film. He plays the predominant plantation owner, a man of intoxicating malevolence, to perfection. Even though he is a psychotic sadist, an antipathetic rapist, and possesses a perplexing God complex, he is bitterly plagued by self-loathing to the point of insanity. The man is so evil he’s practically a caricature. And Fassbender is completely convincing as him. He grounds him, as being horrifyingly believable, and in our nightmares. Behind his hollowly blue eyes there even lies the glimmer of self-consciousness, the smallest of suppositions towards some iota of humanity. He is one of the most terrifying villains projected onto our cinema screens in years without ever being definably villainous.

12 Years a Slave will leave you empty, its portrayal of slavery is abrasive, agonising and devoid of any trace of hope. It is also fantastically executed, fiercely intelligent and a work of immense, yet surprisingly unassuming, importance. I highly, highly recommend you see it.