Slavery will always be a hot button issue for the American film industry, and there is something endlessly horrifying about watching depictions of it. As Quentin Tarantino reminded us in Django Unchained, no matter which way you slice it — racy, “serious,” allegorical etcetera — that nauseating rumble in your guts remains.
Director Steve McQueen’s third feature film summons much of its power not from images (though several are haunting) but a terrific lead performance from Chiwetel Ejiofor, whose projection of fear and courage is a piercing combination.
“I don’t want to survive. I want to live,” he says, and indeed, the film is about transpiring in the face of heinous adversity. It’s a measure of the quality of Ejiofor’s Oscar-nominated performance that that line doesn’t sound cheesy.
In Washington DC, pre-Civil War, Solomon Northup (Ejiofor) is a free black man who is abducted and sold into slavery. He is a masterful violinist unaccustomed to living the despairing life shared by his new-found friends. The film follows his torrid plight as he is thrown between masters and properties.
“He will grow into a fine beast.” Says Paul Giamatti, whacking the chests and prodding the faces of African American men, spruiking them to customers as if they were hunks of dead flesh at a meat market. When Benedict Cumberbatch asks whether he has any sentimentality, the response comes swift: “my sentimentality extends the length of a coin.”
The naturalism of the dialogue in 12 Years a Slave also extends about the length of a coin. It is so thick and theatrical McQueen’s movie often feels like a filmed play. While the emotions ring true, interactions between characters are stilted and heavy-handed, the stiff formality of the writing stymieing its affect. Northup’s response to a woman pleading to be buried in a certain way — “why would you consign me to damnation with such an ungodly request?” — is one of several instances in which grandiloquence trumps emotion.
Some of McQueen’s directorial touches are conspicuously heavy-handed. When Northup is saved from hanging, metallic whirs and groans on the soundtrack could have been lifted straight from a Transformers movie. What follows is an uncomfortably long shot of him attached to a noose to a tree, the tips of his toes on the ground, the soundtrack battered with throat gargling noises. McQueen wants us to feel the horror and degradation of that moment; by lingering so long on it – less, as they say, is something more – he may well have reduced its power.
The non-black characters are starkly divided between good white men in immoral circumstances (Benedict Cumberbatch and Brad Pitt, so virtuous you can almost see the halo) and repulsive men in immoral circumstances (Paul Dano, Paul Giamatti, Michael Fassbender). What’s missing is someone in between: a reasonable person who acts immorally. McQueen is more interested in villains than victims, and gets the most captivating performances out of them. Fassbender, in particular, is hypnotically graceless.
Cinematographer Sean Bobbit, who also shot Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond the Pines, creates some stunning images. But the crux of 12 Years a Slave’s power comes back to Chiwetel Ejiofor. What a great, touching, tenacious performance.
This review was first published at Daily Review.