Breaking the silence

Rating: 9/10 (10 May 2014)

Solomon Northup had his own little slice of heaven: a devoted wife, two lovely children, and his agile mind and talent with the violin had earned him a modest prosperity. But because he lived in 1841, and because he was African-American, his own skin made him a target for the thugs who kidnapped him and sold him into slavery. "I don't want to survive. I want to live," he tells his fellow slaves as a steamship chugs them southward to their fate. But living is not an option for a slave; survival and death are the only alternatives, and there really isn't much else to the story but to watch how Solomon survives for the next twelve years, until freedom finally gives him the chance to live again.
Before I watched this movie, if you asked me "What is slavery?" I would probably have answered something like "Being forced to work without pay." But I think Steve McQueen, director of 12 Years A Slave, would answer quite differently. He deliberately de-emphasizes the raw sweat and pain involved in cutting lumber, hacking sugarcane, and picking cotton. Indeed, Solomon and his fellow slaves' work, and the singing that goes with it, is shown as the least of the horrors they must face. In McQueen's eyes, the essential fact of slavery is being at the absolute mercy of another human being, and you are blessedly lucky if all that human being does to you is make you work without pay. Your master can rape you, whip you, hang you, rob you of your parents or children, or cut up your face to placate whatever inner demons he or she has. He may even force you to do any of these things to your best friend. You can be the hardest-working, most productive slave on a plantation, and still have your back cut to bloody shreds merely because you procured the soap to wash yourself like a human being.
Above all, your master can and will silence you. Forced silence is one of the major themes of 12 Years A Slave. When we first meet Solomon Northup as he cuts sugarcane for a Louisiana judge, neither he nor his fellow slaves ever speak a word. We see an entire scene of seduction and sex where neither person says anything. Then we flash back to Solomon's life in New York, and finally hear his voice, bantering with friends and intoning endearments to his family. Solomon's first encounter with whipping is his punishment for insisting on the truth that he is a free man, not a runaway slave. His next owner slaps him for saying his name is Solomon, not the runaway Platt that his white owner claims he is. Eventually, Solomon absorbs the lesson, and even tries to silence his fellow slave Eliza, who cannot stop crying for her lost children. This is one of the few victories that Solomon wins in this story. He never secures the release of his fellow slaves, and he loses all of his battles in court to recover the twelve years of wages stolen from him and to punish the criminals who kidnapped him. It is not even clear whether he died a free man or not. But he does break free from silence; he writes the story of what happened to him, and we can still hear it today if we listen.
12 Years A Slave, like Toni Morrison's Beloved, avoids the temptation to show all the white slave-owners as evil. As important as it is to recognize the cruelty and sadism of men like Epps and Morrison's Schoolteacher; important as it is to recognize the horrible consequences they caused; still, overemphasizing these sorts of human scum leads to the dangerous and wrong conclusion that slavery would have been all right if only the white masters had been better people. That's the importance of men like Ford, or Morrison's Garners; they show that even when a slave owner is an ordinary decent person, slavery will still degrade and dehumanize his slaves, and corrupt all human warmth and friendship between him and his chattels. One of the most poignant moments in the movie is when Ford rewards Solomon for a clever idea by presenting him with an expensive new violin. We know that Ford thinks he has done the right thing; we can see that Solomon knows and appreciates this, and yet we can also see that Solomon is crushingly disappointed. What he really wanted was his freedom.
Not that 12 Years A Slave is perfect. Like most "issue" movies, it tends to lose its characters in its social and political points. Despite a tour-de-force performance by Chiwete Ejiofor, we never really get to know Solomon Northup very well. He's a sort of Everyman, none of his pre-slavery life or his reactions to his new life of bondage are idiosyncratic or distinctive. This maximizes sympathy at the expense of empathy. Less importantly, but also less excusably, the antebellum New York Solomon lives in appears completely free of all racial prejudice, which is hardly an accurate description of the city even now, much less then. It hardly seems likely that Solomon Northup would have been welcome as a customer at a high-class Washington DC restaurant, when (as the movie points out) black men were not even permitted to testify in Washington courts at that time. While the South certainly did more than its share of dirt to African-Americans during this country's history, I wouldn't blame white Southerners for being sick of bearing the blame alone while the North's own history of discrimination and violence is ignored.
But, unlike many "issue" movies, 12 Years A Slave avoids superficiality and banality. It is not, by any means, the first American movie to take on slavery; all the more impressive, then, that it has something new to say about it.