Best Film Ever.....Hmmmm.

Rating: 9/10 (19 January 2014)

I'm always sceptical of films which arrive on my local multiplex screen with a massive reputation for quality. Is it orchestrated by the film's marketing department in order to get bums on seats? After all we are talking masters in the field of media manipulation, aren't we? So cautiously I approached this film. Having watched "The Railway Man" earlier in the week, I was prepared for another "hard watch". What I was not expecting was to be put through an emotional mangle that left me pretending I had something stuck in my eye that need a good few minutes of "tearing up" before I could leave the cinema - and I was not the only man doing this. I have never had it brought home to me so forcefully what the concept of slavery in the USA of the 1850's was about. How white folk treated black folk as chattel was an ethereal idea for me often coloured by films such as "Gone with the Wind". Steve McQueen's film confronted you with the brutality of it by showing you the viewer what it entailed unflinchingly. To do this he has gathered a technical team and a group of actors and committed them to being at the top of their game in order to show the cinema-going world what slavery is, so that the next time you see a newspaper headline that talks of "human trafficking" you are aware that slavery has not completely gone away and still needs to be stamped out and its' perpetrators brought to summary justice. What would a modern equivalent be? Emily Watson criminally drugged up on a night out and then enduring a "taming" process in order to end up in a middle-eastern harem. Fanciful thinking? There are too many stories in the press of girls from Eastern Europe and China enduring this shameful activity for you to realise that slavery has not gone away.
But what about the film and the performances in it? I always thought of Chiwetel Ejiofar as the jobbing black actor with the unpronounceable name whose portfolio of performances made him hard to pigeon-hole but here I think I have seen an actor make full use of his natural equipment i.e. body, speech and, most tellingly, eyes, to create a performance that has seared itself into my memory. His is a complex portrayal of a man wrenched from the comfort of his environment and forced to see and endure man's inhumanity to man. How he shows us what it means to be changed from a "man" to a "thing" deserves all the accolades he gets. As for the rest of the cast, it would have been easy to make them into "types" - the "good" slave-owner, the "evil" slave-owner, the "evil" slave-owner's wife, the beautiful slave-girl, the brutal overseer etc.. McQueen certainly does not do that here. With John Ridley, he has given the actors a chance to invest themselves into making a "living" document that really made me feel as if I was there. We all know that Cumberbatch, Dano, Fassbender, Giamatti and Paulson are pros and have added another excellent role to their respective c.v.s. The major discovery here is Lupita Nyong'o. We see her initially dancing in a free-spirited way that obviously attracts the lust of her owner and the hatred of the owner's wife and then we see her being broken. You would have to be made of stone not to shed tears at seeing the way this is done. Her "Patsey" will live long in anyone's memory and if justice were to be done then her performance will receive the highest awards. Watch out for her - she is a star.
As for the technical team, John Ridley wrote the right words, Sean Babbit is getting ready to step into the shoes of Sven Nykvist, Joe Walker's editing helped to make the unwatchable watchable and finally talking about the totally unexpected, Hans Zimmer, yes, HANS ZIMMER, wrote the music. So "Best Film Ever" - no. But sooo close... Now when I watch the "slap" scene in the film "In the Heat of the Night" I will truly understand what was going on and why it was such a shock. Thank you for that Mr McQueen.