All the Praise is Justified

Rating: 10/10 (19 April 2014)

Yep. Everyone was right.
Everyone who heaped praise after praise of this movie during award season last year was completely right. I have a hard time thinking of any other movie released in the past few years that has the sheer dramatic power of this one, weaving together probably the best representation of the institution of Slavery in the Antebellum South that has ever been put on screen. The impact that this film has on the audience is only increased by the fact that it is based on a true story, with very very few deviations from the source material (a firsthand account from Solomon Northup, the film's hero). This movie turns an empathetic eye to the struggles of our hero as he gets chewed up, swallowed, and (thankfully) spit back out by the machine that is slavery.
Now, the phrase 'based on a true story' is one of the most blatant abuses in Hollywood today and it's refreshing to see such a powerful real-life story take such advantage of that much-abused concept.
And powerful it is.
Now, the story of Slavery is probably the single largest mark of shame in all of American history (with some competition of course) and 12 Years a Slave treats it as the inhumane atrocity that it is without sensationalizing it or making it a cliché-ridden melodrama like it could have become. In fact, this movie's willingness to stray away from being a cliché and trite pity-fest is what sets it apart as a cinematic recounting of historical events.
Every single time this movie appears to drift into the territory of audience-pleasing it takes a sharp-left turn by mercilessly subjecting the audience to one atrocity after another. From the excruciatingly dragged-out attempted lynching scene to the bold and challenging whipping scene, this movie pulls no punches in its quest to examine the evils of institutionalized abuse.
While the brutality of the on-screen violence does wonders, what 12 Years a Slave does to be classified as the best movie about slavery instead of an excellent movie about slavery is how, instead of focusing on how 'being a slave is bad,' it takes its time to develop that thesis into the much more all-encompassing 'slavery is bad.' Any hackneyed director can show a slave being tortured and say to the audience that "see, all of the atrocities committed as a part of slavery is bad!" 12 Years a Slave, with its wonderful direction by Steve McQueen (the not-dead one), makes it go one step further by saying that the very idea of slavery (saying that a person is not a person and therefore another man's property) is fundamentally wrong.
It is this commitment to an ideological critique of slavery that makes this one of the smartest movies in recent memory. That is, not to say that this movie is complicated or obfuscatory like other so-called 'smart' movies (We'll get to some of those soon enough), it is that it is an extremely focused critique that can genuinely enlighten a viewer to a new way of seeing things (instead of a movie that makes the viewer think they're enlightened).
Everyone always talks about a few things about this movie especially the top-notch acting (note: I stand by my statement that Chiwetel Ejiofor was robbed at the Oscars), I noticed something that very few critics didn't: the excellent score. Much like how it steers away from being a cliché historical piece, the soundtrack doesn't want to be cliché either. Instead of a grand, sweeping score that evokes the feelings of time gone by, this soundtrack is wonderfully minimalist, perfectly fitting every scene it appears in and not appearing in any scenes where it wouldn't. The oft-repeated string motif that appears all throughout the film is perhaps the perfect representation of Solomon's unfounded hope for escape even in the darkest of times and sounds as if it wouldn't be out-of-place on a Godspeed You! Black Emperor album, showing how good a movie soundtrack could be when it deviates from the norm.
Just as Schindler's List has become the best cinematic representation of the Holocaust, 12 Years a Slave will go down in history as one of the best portrayals of Slavery. Thanks to a pointed ideological critique of the darkest times of American history and a audience-crushing sense of despair, 12 Years a Slave is one of the best movies in the last several years and should be required watching for any American citizen.
originally posted on http://cinemacountdown.wordpress.com/