A Very Moving and Important Story

Rating: 9/10 (17 September 2016)

12 Years a Slave, directed by Steve McQueen, is, if not a perfect film, among the very important pieces of modern cinema. It's based on a true story of a man named Solomon Northup, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a free black man in New York state, who one day is tricked and kidnapped and sold down south into slavery in the early 1840's. Seeing his life, and then seeing it suddenly ripped away is truly disturbing and heart-wrenching. It's not that we should feel worse for him than those who were born into slavery, who treated as bad or in many cases much worse; but telling the tale through the contrast highlights, extremely effectively, how inhumane this slave culture was.
Northup, after the terrifying transition into confinement, is shuttled from his kidnappers to slave traders to a plantation, and when that doesn't turn out so well to another plantation, the last where the majority of the movie takes place. All parts of the journey tell the struggle he goes through in different ways, and show the injustices of the era—all obviously awful—came in a variety, not a picture that can be drawn with a broad brush. It's unflinching in its brutality, to a critical and real purpose. Ejiofor is outstanding, as is Lupita Nyong'o, Michael Fassbender, Sarah Paulson, and the host of supporting roles; included are some well-known actors who never come across as cameos but as very human pieces of this story that fit exceptionally well into the history, and never distract. Good and bad guys and those in-between, no one is typified by clichés or with complete simplicity.
Slavery is the United States' greatest sin. It's unfortunate it took nearly 100 years for our cinema to get from Birth of Nation to 12 Years a Slave, but now that it's here it's something that must be watched—watched by all Americans to further understand their history as this movie forthrightly displays; watched all film lovers for its powerful, exquisite craft on screen; and watched by all people to stress what can occur when a group of people is dehumanized in a culture. Slavery, or things not that far from slavery, still occur in too many corners of the world, we as a species are not past this completely still, and that is something we can be reminded of with this informative, tough and quite masterful drama on the subject.