Degradation and Despair

Rating: 9/10 (29 January 2014)

During the days of the big studio system slavery was a topic that was generally avoided. The standard interpretation of the era's history made such work as Birth Of A Nation and later Gone With The Wind the way we saw the era. It was the Civil Rights Revolution that opened a lot eyes and now with a bit of perspective there, a film like the incredible true story 12 Years A Slave could be made.
Not only is it true what happens to Chiwetel Ejifor's character this was hardly a unique situation. Slave catchers were really down on the social scale even at that time, but it was a business to them. So of course if you can't find a genuine runaway slave, why just take any black person that answers a general description. Naturally free black people were on the alert, but these two low lifes who capture him use stealth and planning to bring him to the south and sell him.
This story of degradation and despair is a future cinema classic and ought to be required viewing in schools and for those who think any group of human kind deserves to be treated in this way. Slave owners knew exactly what they were doing when it was forbidden to educate a slave. If you remember in Band Of Angels Clark Gable did educate the child who grew up to be Sidney Poitier almost to his dying regret. The hardest thing that Ejifor has to do is conceal his education in order to survive.
Michael Fassbender plays the last and worst of a series of plantation owners who Ejifor is in slavery to. Fassbender is amazing to watch as his character sinks into moral degeneracy as more and more he has to justify this system.
The saddest story in the film is not our protagonist's. Rather it is that of Lupita Nyong'o who plays a woman separated from her children when she's sold off in a slave market which is placed in someone's parlor. The degradation and misery she endures can only be compared to Schindler's List and clearly 12 Years A Slave was influenced by that Spielberg masterpiece. You have to a Medusa victim not to be moved by Nyong'o on the screen.