The perfect response to "Django Unchained" ...

Rating: 10/10 (17 January 2014)

If there ever was one movie that Hollywood owed big time to the Black Community, it is certainly Steve McQueen's "12 Years a Slave".
Warning ahead, this is not-another-film-about-racism, this is not a fashionably white-guilt-inducing drama, this is not "The Help", "The Butler" or "The Color Purple", "12 Years a Slave" is of a league of its own. The movie explores familiar grounds until suddenly bare-handedly digging into the crass that soiled American memory, extracting from it, an experience like so few cinematic experiences. Again, it does look familiar. What we see, we know but it's precisely about knowing what we see: a bold, accurate and gut-wrenching depiction of slavery as a holocaust.
Yes, holocaust. The term seemed to belong exclusively for World War II and till now, whenever uttered, it's Nazi uniforms, swastikas, concentration camps and striped pajamas that come to minds, night and fog, rather than sunshine and cotton fields, German shepherds and rifles rather than trees and ropes  but if there is one certitude that no one should ever deny, not anymore, it is that slavery started through the denial of black people's humanity, a misconception that lasted for centuries, a length unparalleled by no other atrocity whatsoever. Population mass slaughters, slavery, transatlantic trades, all started with the general consensus that black people were born for servitude, the holocaust was moral in the first place.
My exhilaration while watching "12 Years a Slave" was governed by an awkward mix of revulsion and satisfaction, each frame was unnerving but in the same time, I was thinking, "God, that's what eyes must see", minds know what it is, but eyes have to be affected, have to be inflicted the spectacle of slavery and its intimate rape on innocent souls. Looking in close-up at the effects whipping can have on a poor woman's back, at the blood splattering at each whip, the noise hardly covered by the shrill screams, that instead of a sentimental close-up on a teary eye. The film is still full of tears and close-ups but they never distract from the cruelty reached by slave owners in some particularly upsetting scene.
Of course, the comparison with "Schindler's List" is inevitable. Even I, did start the review by mentioning the word 'holocaust', because I believe the film has a profound cathartic effect for a community, allowed to be acknowledged the extents of the brutality they were victim of, something that hasn't been covered that much by film-making. "Can we get over racism and slavery, it's been 150 years?" complain some, well, Cinema didn't tackle it enough  can you imagine that a film like "Django Unchained" was praised for being one of the first mainstream movies to deal with slavery? This is how Cinema desperately needed a film to make the point "Django" didn't make or made badly for the sake of a cheap and pornographic depiction of violence..
Just look at the performance of Di Caprio in "Django" he's a suave and distinguished villain à la 'Bill the Butcher' but can anyone who finds him despicable ever put words on Michael Fassbender's portrayal of Master Epps? Fassbender in "12 Years a Slave" oozed the kind of vileness I never found on movies since Amon Goeth in "Schindler's List". But while the Nazis believed Jews were disposable human beings, who could die any time slavers thought they had a biblical right on their slaves, they cherished the idea of owning them, on the plantation field, and Epss' fascination with Patsy (Lupita Nyong'o) the most cotton-picker of the plantation, the sensual attraction he feels toward her reveals something much deeper and no less disturbing in the inner psychology lying underneath the surface of slavery: possession.
And the attachment to the notion of possession became the slaves' real chain: they could be beaten, whipped, but not killed, unless they died from exhaustion or lynched. And it is so telling how envied those who die are. Blacks weren't regarded as humans, not even animals, almost like objects, and that makes the whole reality even more difficult to accept. And the documentary-like realism of McQueen's masterpiece was the perfect response to Tarantino's fantasy western-spaghetti. Not to deny Tarantino's right, he used the same plots for a "Jews vs. Nazis" story in "Ingloruious Basterds" but how many holocaust dramas were already made to fulfill their educational purpose. "Django" had to come after "12 Years a Slave", only 1 year before is a thin consolation.
I wish I could expose more in this review, than the parallel with World War II holocaust, but this is my genuine reaction. I just read that Steve McQueen felt like reading Anne Frank's diary from Solomon Northup's novel retracing his 12 years of detention as a slave. I wouldn't blame him either for making a film that would play like a 'Black' "Schindler's List", especially since the film doesn't suffer from Spielberg's usual flaws. "12 Years a Slave" is not sentimental, not Manichean, not cartoonish. As a matter of fact, Whites are not all despicable, for one whip-happy Paul Dano, you have Benedict Cumberbatch as a comprehensive and benevolent master, for one scary Sarah Paulson as Epps' sister, you have Pitt as a Canadian progressive.
Never patronizing, never compromising, the film is all about the fight and struggle of Solomon Northup, magnificently portrayed by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a man profoundly humanist, not as a philosopher, but simple as a man who sees humanity in every color and race, and can't therefore believe what he's going through, a man anachronistically modern, we can all identify with, and this is why his experience is so harrowing, so moving, so penetrating.
Spike Lee said you can't make a western-spaghetti out of slavery because it was a holocaust, at least, the film proves his point right. Steve McQueen did it, finally, screaming what "The Help" and even the opening scene of "The Butler" (which I look at now with more perplexed eyes) whispered.