Down the Rabbit-Hole into Slavery...

Rating: 9/10 (12 March 2014)

'Twelve Years a Slave' is a tightly written, well-crafted film that further explores Ingmar Bergman's assertion that Film has nothing to do with Literature, but shares greater affinities with Painting, Music and Photography. The film itself is beautiful to look at; owing to its Director Steve McQueen and its Cinematographer Sean Bobbitt as well as its Film Editor Joe Walker. While others I talked to found the film 'brutal', I found it remarkably restrained and its narrative compelling without being driven by the roller-coaster pyrotechnics of films post Indiana Jones. The film explores a set of issues with intelligence albeit going down a well-trodden road. The Three Laws of Fred Williamson are applied here for once with a subtle sophistication and a hint of profound implication rarely to be seen during the Blaxploitation Era.
The subject matter being as fulsome as it is, I was not exactly foaming at the mouth to see this one. After all, nobody needed to tell me who would be playing the Masters and who would be playing the Slaves. Just as toy dogs fly well when kicked, African Americans and sundry other people of color make great victims to pivot the story around in films such as 'Spartacus' and 'The Sting'. Here in a culture that glories in violence and falls in love so easily with death projected on the silver screen, Blacks make excellent fodder for the pigs in the slaughterhouse.
While I was watching 'Twelve Years a Slave', my mischievous imagination started itching me. There must be a parallel universe somewhere, I figured, where Blacks were herding Whites into waiting ships to be sent to distant lands and auctioned off for their strength, beauty and utility in a thousand and one ways as well as to be a supplementary source of energy more valuable than coal or oil. However, this was not to be that story, and 'Twelve Years a Slave' hews pretty close to the formula for this kind of fare.
The twist here is that Solomon Northrup starts out a free man privy to all the amenities of his times. That is before someone can whisper in his ear that the white man speaks with a forked tongue and he then finds himself waking up in chains. This turn of events comes after a night of revelry with new-found friends, who, unbeknownst to Northrup, are looking for another slave to log into the books. At this point, the gate begins to swing wide on the horrors of the antebellum South.
Chiwetel Ejiofor's Solomon Northrup is a gifted and intelligent man able to postulate his own solutions to many problems and this becomes apparent throughout the narrative. But here in Slave Country his skills and talents win him no reward or empowerment, simply the inverse of such phenomena. This is heart-wrenching to watch and makes you want to grab something hard to hit somebody with. It is the age-old conundrum. How do you reason with someone who simply wants to control and dominate you for the thrill and empowering pleasure of it? Is feeling superior to someone or something really that valuable an experience?
Discuss amongst yourselves.
Perhaps the most troubling character is Lupita Nyong'o as Patsey. She is a woman born and bred into slavery. You see her producing two to two and a half times as much product picking cotton as any of the other slaves male or female. Today she would probably be working her way up the ladder to running her own company and eventually rubbing elbows with Oprah Winfrey. But here in this cultural context, her exceptional production wins her abuse, disfigurement and mutilation and the choice between cultural murder of the spirit and the body by degrees at the hands of slave owners or the death wish of the suicide.
I'll have to admit I was glad she won an Oscar for such an anguishing and haunting portrayal.
The flashbacks to Northrup's life prior to slavery are musically handled and the scene at the end of Northrup meditating upon his misery is one of the best interior monologues I have seen in Cinema. The cast is well rounded out with veterans like Alfre Woodard, Benedict Cumberbatch, Sarah Paulson and Paul Dano holding down supporting roles. Until that film comes out where whites are walking in chains seething with self hatred, I'll have to tip my hat to the elevated craft of 'Twelve Years a Slave'.
There are three additional thoughts of note that have come to mind. While I do not plan to be doing any slave owning any time soon, it seems to me Patsey's 'owners' might have been curious as to how she was outproducing all the other slaves in her party. Could it be possible she was using advanced techniques that could be shared with her other brethren, or was she simply exercising a higher level of manual dexterity due to her gender? The other thing that came to mind is that I was finally convinced due to the meditative quality of this film that the great Carter G. Woodson was right. The African mind is essentially an Oriental mind. Finally, it seems to me that 'Twelve Years a Slave' can be seen as a darker (no pun intended) version of 'Sullivan Travels'.
But, unlike the Butler in 'Sullivan's Travels', I do not advise you to shun the subject of slavery even for the purposes of study.