McQueen eschews the gratuitously graphic without flinching from the disturbing subject matter. Solomon faces an agonizing moral quandary that, if treated in an exploitative way, would repel instead it invites reflection. One pivotal sequence is so devastating you wonder how anyone could have survived it. The most incredible aspect of Northup’s story is that he lived to tell it. It examines the institution without reaching for a rhetorical whip, moral cudgel or anything designed to assuage ethical or aesthetic sensibilities. Based on the book Northup published in 1853 about his ordeal, it forcefully portrays the barbarity and perverse logic behind antebellum slavery. Sean Bobbitt, who photographed director Steve McQueen’s previous movies, “Hunger” and “Shame,” delivers evocative imagery throughout this carefully calibrated film. But be forewarned: even knowing that Solomon’s odyssey ends eventually, it is hard to find joy in this unsettling work. The film astonishes because it is so wrenching yet unsentimental, so devastating yet sober, so harrowing yet beautiful. Having determined it is fruitless to fight back or attempt an escape, he looks for a chance to send word home. Solomon gradually decides he must adopt a submissive demeanor, alter his manner of speech and stifle his talents and intellect in order to survive. One former overseer, who is made to pick cotton alongside Epps’s slaves, thinks so many whites in the slave milieu are unhinged or dissolute because “no man can whip another daily without tearing himself apart.” Identities on both sides are torn asunder. Epps is the most egregious example, but most every slave owner in the film seems to relish being cruel. The depraved mentality Solomon is up against can be described as viciousness bordering on the psychotic. Epps is sadistic and fixated on his young slave mistress Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o). But after clashing with an overseer on Ford’s sugarcane plantation, he is sent to the cotton estate of Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender). Northup is sold to William Ford of Louisiana (Benedict Cumberbatch), a relatively compassionate man. Thus begins the titular experience of 12 Years a Slave, a film based on a true story from antebellum America. It was a trap, however, and Northup was kidnapped and given a new identity: Platt Hamilton, runaway Georgia slave. Don’t miss.In 1841 Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a black violinist living in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., with his wife and children, was invited by two white performers to join them on a lucrative circus tour. It’s sometimes too talkative, but it’s visually and emotionally compelling. There’s fine support from Brad Pitt, Paul Dano, Paul Giamatti and Lupita Nyongo, among many others, but the film belongs to Ejiofor and Fassbender and their battle of moral wills. Much later, Spielberg’s Amistad (1997) tried to redress the idealistic balance but simplistically showed the slaves as noble savages, rather than complex humans. Perhaps it was always going to take a black director to get the picture of slavery focussed correctly. Selznick made his epic Gone With the Wind (1939), Joseph Breen at the Hollywood Production Code Administration fretted upon the lusty embraces of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, and over Butler’s earthy wording, ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,’ but the movie’s soft-toned portrait of slavery didn’t bother Breen one bit.ĭW Griffith’s masterly, but morally suspect, Birth of a Nation (1915) effectively blamed the bloody rupture of the American Civil War on Abolitionist agitators and “uppity shines”, a view endorsed by President Woodrow Wilson. One wary producer told Ford: “If you make a film about n*****s, only n*****s will pay to see it.” In the 1950s, John Ford tried to raise cash for a biopic of Frederick Douglass but found no funding. This follows on from 2013, when Spielberg’s Lincoln and Tarantino’s Django Unchained spotlighted one of American history’s most wounding legacies.ĭespite its inherent drama, American cinema has mostly skirted slavery.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |