Full disclosure: Though I've heard excellent things about both, I've never seen Hunger or Shame, director Steve McQueen's pre-12 Years a Slave flicks. They're on my list… but so are a ton of other movies. Like E.T.. All the movies I watch, and I've still somehow hit 29 without seeing E.T.. I know, I know.
What I'm trying to say is that if I had seen Hunger or Shame I probably wouldn't have gone into 12 Years a Slave expecting something Oscar bait-y. On the surface, 12 Years look at a lot like The Butler: Critically acclaimed director. Similar subjects (slavery vs post-slavery racism and the civil rights movement). A cameopalooza of famous actors popping up everywhere.
And I hated The Butler, because it didn't leave me feeling anything except vague irritation at Forest Whitaker's career. A Martin Luther King scene here. An Obama scene there. But put it all together and it's all a bunch of empty platitudes with a feel-good bent to make it palatable for inclusion in the "movies your grandmother who hasn't been to a theater since 2010 will like" category.
But 12 Years a Slave was not that. Oh boy howdy, was it not. "Palatable" is the last word I'd use to describe it. And I mean that in a good way.
12 Years is a brutal movie to watch. It fixes its lens on the horrors of slavery and forces its audience not to look away. There's a scene, for example, when the main character Solomon Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free man sold into slavery, gets hanged, but his feet are touching the ground, so he's still being choked but he's not going to die anytime soon. And McQueen stays on that shot for minutes. By the end of it you're like.
This movie lets no one off the hook. In that whole ginormous cast there are only two decent white dudes, and the only one with a major role is Canadian. You hear that, American north? Just because there weren't plantations in you doesn't mean you have a claim to virtue. Slavery wasn't just the South. It was an institution. A national shame. With its equal-opportunity awfulness, 12 Years is basically:
There's a shot of the building where Northrup's being held before getting shipped down South that absolutely punches you in the gut, because we see that he's being held right outside the Capitol building.
Is 12 Years a Slave a subtle movie?
Does it tend a bit toward the torture porn-y at times?
For the most part the tendency toward the simplistically gruesome was saved by wonderful performances. Ejiofor added nuance to the role that wasn't in the script and against all odds kept the occasional hackneyed line of dialogue ("I don't want to survive! I want to live!") from being wince-inducingly corny.
If he doesn't get an Oscar nomination I'm going to riot. Yes, all by myself. I don't care. I will clone myself and then riot.
Michael Fassbender was great as the capital-E Evil slave owner Epps. Benedict Cumberbatch was also good as the lower case-e evil slave owner Ford.
I love what was done with Ford's character, by the way. Yeah, he's a relatively nice dude because he listens to his slaves sometimes gives them presents when they're good. But he's still a slave owner who sees the wrongs around them and goes LALALALALALA because he benefits from the misfortune of others. He'd rather give Northrup to Epps than punish the psychotic overseer who has it in for him. He suspects Northrup's a free man, but he'd rather not think about it. He still sees slaves as property; he just treats his toys better than other people do.
The only time when I really felt the movie fall down was with Brad Pitt's character. Remember how I said the movie's tendency toward unsubtlety was saved by great performances? Yeah, not here. Pitt plays a guy who, basically, shows up for an extended cameo and saves Northrup from slavery. He's the only white guy in the movie who speaks out against slavery, and he does so to Epps' face, straight up telling this evil bastard that he's an evil bastard and he's bad and he should feel bad. I couldn't pinpoint anything specifically bad about Pitt's performance, but it has a distinct air of "Hello, I am hunky Brad Pitt and I am here to save you, Chiwetel Ejiofor."
Other actors, even the ones with a few scenes, generally managed to disappear into their characters. Brad Pitt was just Brad Pitt.
(Also, I'm not saying that Pitt was cast as one of two decent white guys because he was one of the movie's producers. But… well, he was one of the movie's producers. And he played one of the two decent white guys. Make of that what you will.)
But other than that bit of clunkiness, the movie was great. It makes The Butler look like a damn Hallmark card. Final verdict: Four of of five dancing aliens.
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