An amazing movie

Rating: 10/10 (15 November 2013)

Toward the end of the movie Platt, a field slave, reveals his story to an itinerant carpenter, Samuel Bass (Brad Pitt in a cameo role), who remarks "you have an amazing story to tell, but it's not pleasant." For "Platt" is Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a legally freed man from New York state. Platt is his a slave name literally beaten into him after his kidnapping in Washington City in 1841. Kept chained and beaten in a slave pen in Washington City, he and other kidnapped blacks are shipped to New Orleans and sold in slavery.
Platt lives a life of horror. A horror so horrendous and unrelenting it's "amazing." 12 Years A Slave frequently uses the n-word and this adds immensely to its truthfulness and accuracy. Many whites in the South considered blacks subhuman, hence keeping them as slaves was not only acceptable, it was supported by the Bible, or at least their twisted interpretation of it.
Some of the slavers (wealthy, privileged plantation owners who formed the backbone of the ante-bellum South) were reasonably decent men: Ford, Judge Turner. But the slavery system made the slavers wealthy men and they all bought into the economic system that made them rich and prosperous. And their white underlings were savagely racist to the core. It's a fact the less fortunate ape the wealthy. Look around today. That behavior's still out there in spades. The wealthy do it and ten years later everyone wants to do it, or at least wish they could do it. And with our Twitters and Facebooks it doesn't even take ten years anymore. A celebrity does it today and ten seconds later everyone wants to do it.
Northup tries to keep up hope but finally is full of despair, signified by his watching the last embers of a letter he intended to send to his wife but instead burned and also by the purposeful destruction of his violin. He's afraid to even trust a white man. It's only Bass's outspoken abolitionist opinions that make Northup trust him. And it's through Bass's help that Solomon Northup is finally freed from the total hellhole on Earth that was Edwin Epps's plantation. I found myself wondering what happened to all those poor, desperate people that he left behind.
The acting in this movie is superb. In particular Chiwetel Ejiofor stands out as Solomon Northup/Platt and the sufferings he endures day after day. Michael Fassbender does an outstanding job portraying Edwin Epps the sad, sadistic, paranoid, megalomaniac, depraved human being whose humanity still comes through. And every other actor plays their part to a tee. The scenery, costumes, and settings were absolutely fantastic. From capturing Washington City in 1841 to the large plantations in the Deep South, Steve McQueen and his crew recreated a totally convincing ante-bellum South in minute detail. I certainly hope this movie garners a bunch of Academy Awards this coming February. It richly deserves them.
On a philosophical level the movie broaches slavery as an institution. Should human beings be sold to other human beings as chattel? Anthropological evidence suggests hunter-gatherers probably didn't indulge in it much. But every civilization in existence from 3000 BC onward had either slaves outright or those that were one step up (serfs). The late anthropologist-philosopher, Ernest Gellner, called the people who claw their way to the top of a society either by force or by chicanery, the thugs. And there are still plenty of thugs around. Someone has to do society's dirty work. And so the slave trade came into existence. And there are still slaves around too. People who are forced into indebted servitude against their will where their chances of escaping are virtually nil.
To wrap up, a truly gripping and powerful movie, but definitely not for those who prefer to avoid the realities of life and who like nice, cheery, feel-good stories. Not for those either who like blow-'em-ups/ shoot-'em-ups. Many of the scenes are very brutal and very intense.
This movie will make you ponder in depth the inhumanity and abject cruelty some humans do to other humans. And it's still going on out there in spades in many parts of the world. Maybe this movie will make us think more deeply how it might be stopped. I sure hope so.