Over rated

Rating: 3/10 (29 January 2014)

Steve McQueen's first film was a masterpiece and since then it's seriously going downhill: Shame was pretentious and moralist and it didn't make me feel for the main character an film felt it was misogynistic in the way the main character's sister was being punished for him and for trying to be happy and alive.
Anyway, it at least had the merit to have style (even if it was over substance : I didn't learn anything I didn't know about sex addict) because 12 Years a Slave lacks this : style, it could have been directed by any Hollywood director.
There is a bit of Steve McQueen left in it (the hanging scene is a good example), but not much. First the music is atrocious and feels like it's been whacked in two minutes on garage band, not original, boring and useless except for one scene where the soundtrack gets menacing and slowly covers the Diegetic music that the main character plays.
The rhythm of the film is flawed, it's smoothed and fast at the beginning when the main guy is being kidnapped, then it's completely all over the place and you have the feeling that's it's been 4 years a slave and not 12.
It's also so Manichaean it's painful to watch : bad vs good. The hero is good, the guys that kidnap him are good but suddenly they're bad, the guys that ship him to the south are bad, and it carries on till then end, thank god there's a few good actors to bring some subtlety (Paul Dano is magnificent in his pure evilness and you detect some madness in him ), Michael Fassbender is a brutal drunk you kind of feel sorry for even if he is a pure monster. But then you Paul Giamati as bad bad ( in every way he's an awful actor with zero charisma and whose ugliness than no charm can even save), then it's poor black men and evil or cowardly white people : best example Cumberbatch who looks lost in the film, his wife bad woman, but the worse is the good white men : The hero's friend who is gentle and kind but is nothing else than kindness, his character clearly doesn't exist, and then there's Brad Pitt : being the producer of the film he gives himself the part of the good spirited and modern white man who is going to save the hero and lecture the bad Fasbender that there will be payback day for the bad things southerner are doing to slaves. And he looks like a Pre hippie kind of rebel mixed with his Chanel advert homeless look. At that point I felt like getting a pair of scissors and slashing the screen.
On top of that the film is ultra predictable, the hero is reunited to his family and he has a grandson and everybody cries (well what about all the poor other slaves? very subtle happy ending Mr McQueen) we are all supposed to cry. it's not the only emotional blackmail in the film the scene or the hero's lover is whipped, and he is forced to whip her, the scene is just pornographic violence, pointless in the film except forcing the spectator to cry. It's not about the whipping that is wrong it's the way the scene is depicted that is morally wrong, like the rape scene under a beautiful red moon, why should a horrible scene like that aesthetic and almost poetic, after Shame I really wonder what kind of problem Steve McQueen has with women. A lot more efficient is the hanging scene which is a long scene where the hero is hanging from a tree tip toe and trying not to be strangle by a rope while in the background business goes as usual: people doing their daily chores. It works because it shows how atrocity can happen anywhere anytime with a lovely weather in everyday life, that horror can take place in the ordinary, it's so understated and not stylized that it is refreshing, it's a long still shot and paradoxically it's one of the most interesting of the whole film.
The film is just a real story being told with no real message behind it : OK it's awful that freed black men were adducted in the north to be enslaved in the south but what is Steve McQueen is trying to say? That slavery is bad? well we figured that out and Spielberg made a better job with The Colour Purple , even Django Unchained is more convincing in depicting the atrocity of slavery, and even if it's caricature the characters in it are more authentic and subtle than in Manichaean 12 years a slave. OK so maybe it's about depicting the evil of earthlings? Well Manderlay and the The legend of n**** Charley's were more effective, because it at least knew what it wanted to be, and those were more believable while being pure fiction because their character had depth. The other massive flaw in the film is it's long and boring, some scenes are pointless, they don't help the story telling they have no message or do not give you any emotion. The dialogs are so contrived and theatrical that it's affects the whole film, you have the feeling that some scenes would be marvelous in a theater but not in cinema. Actually the film works best when Steve McQueen resolves to use visual to express himself than when he uses dialogs
You do get the feeling of anger there was in Hunger from times to times, mainly at the beginning but then it is dis-activated by all those boring illustrative and over explained scenes. I'm sorry but I don't want to get bored during a film that treat something as serious as slavery.