Emotionally draining and worth it

Rating: 9/10 (18 January 2014)

12 years a Slave, an unflinching account of a free black man in the antebellum North who is abducted and sold into slavery in the Deep South, is a brilliant adaptation, a real work of art by auteur Steve McQueen. It's brutally forthcoming and neither panders to its audience nor glosses over the evil that men (and women) do. It features an transcendent performance by Chiwetel Ejiofor as the lead, nearly matched by Michael Fassbender, as an exceptionally cruel slaveowner.
The story opens in Saratoga Springs, New York. Solomon Northrup (Ejiofor) has just seen his wife and two children off on a trip. While walking across the town square, Solomon meets a couple of men who wish for Solomon to play violin for their circus. He travels with them down to Washington, DC and wines and dines with the gentlemen in celebration of Solomon's contribution to the entertainment. But Solomon becomes ill and is put to bed by the men; in the morning, he finds himself in a slave pen, unable to produce papers that would prove him to be a free man.
Solomon is acquired by a slave trader named, ironically, Freeman (Paul Giamatti), who in turns sells Solomon and others to a landowner named Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch) down in Georgia. Solomon's name is now Platt, and his odyssey proceeds through several owners, some meaner than others, but none quite capable for seeing him as the human being he is. Solomon witnesses many evils, including torture, rape, and murder for even the smallest slights against white people and finds that even to survive he cannot count on any help, inside or out.
This is not an easy movie to watch. It's not just about shining a light on of the most morally deplorable times in our nation's brief history; it's about getting inside the head of a trapped man, a man desperate to return to his loving family but beset on all sides by incoherent rage and inhumanity. As Solomon himself puts it, "I don't want to survive. I want to live."
Ejiofor is terrific. When Solomon feels pain, physical or emotional, we feel his pain as well, through Ejiofor's heart-breaking, commanding performance. Solomon's attitude transforms him from a this-must-be-a- mistake nonbeliever trying to convince people he is indeed a legally free man to a defiant, determined, and desperate sojourner. It's a remarkable piece of work by Ejiofor, who had his first break into movies with Steven Spielberg's Amistad - also with slavery as its main theme.
McQueen has assembled a profoundly talented cast to back him up. As the worst villain in the lot, Fassbender (as slaveowner Epps) is more than just convincing - you half expect to learn that Fassbender is a true Southern boy rather than being German born - he is also spellbinding as the horrid Epps, a man even nastier than Leonardo DiCaprio's vaunted Calvin Candie from Django Unchained. Candie was a smirking frat boy compared with Edwin Epps, a man who delights in using his slaves for whatever he wishes, punishing them when they don't pick enough in his cotton fields, favoring one as a plaything even over his own wife (Sarah Paulson).
One aspect I really liked about this movie was that it never paints any white person as the savior of the black protagonist. Never. How many movies have we seen about slavery and civil rights in which some white person deigns to help the black people and is thus their hero? It's not so here. The closest is Cumberbatch's Ford, but even then the landowner would rather save his skin than form a connection with Solomon (or hear that Solomon is actually a free man). There is no help to be found from kindly white folks here. (Aside - okay, there is, right near the end, but it's apparently true to Solomon's experiences and does not make up for the years of agony that Solomon experienced before running into said white person by chance.) A lesser movie may have tried to shoehorn in a ray of hope for Solomon Northrup in a half-baked attempt to reach a wider audience, but thankfully that didn't happen here.
This isn't a popcorn movie, and it's probably not a date movie. It's intellectual and brutish, realistic, believable, painful, and astonishing. It's clearly one of the best of the year and of the careers of McQueen, Ejiofor, and Fassbender.