"I have had a... difficult time."

Rating: 9/10 (12 January 2014)

I watched this last night and I'm still trying to pull my thoughts together on it. I'd heard a lot of hype about the movie, with people declaring it to be the best picture of 2013 and an Oscar winner several months into last year, and I probably walked into the theatre mentally challenging 12 Years A Slave to live up to that hype. I actually didn't think that it would. I mean, how could it?
But it did.
I honestly can't remember the last time I was this devastated whilst sitting in a movie theatre.
I guess that's probably due to the movies I tend to see there, which place spectacle above characterisation and dramatic weight, but this movie broke me. I was fine for the first two thirds, admiring the editing and mentally applauding the fantastic acting on display, but the final third of the movie finally reached inside and just tore something out. By the time we had reached poor Patsy begging her master for soap just so she could clean herself, I realised that I was actually crying. From that point onward, I no longer felt like an observer but someone who had walked those painful years with Solomon, and I shed more tears as we reached that final apology, and that swelling music, and the cards telling us how Solomon Northup was denied justice and that the date, location and circumstances of his death were unknown. That text was almost as bad as anything I had been confronted with prior to its appearance; the mere thought that this great man - who had endured so much and been witness to such unspeakable things, who hung from a rope and came back from it, whose time as a husband and a father was snatched away by a single mistake - had vanished without a trace from the Earth saddened me greatly.
I've not seen any of McQueen's other movies and will now, of course, remedy that. This was a difficult movie but one I'm glad to have experienced, even though it chiselled away at a little piece of my soul. It's a testament of how terrible humans can be to one another, but also how great film can truly be in the right hands, as it's a medium which can achieve many things but here, in 12 Years A Slave, it is used for the highest of purposes; to entertain, to elevate, and to educate. I did not know Solomon Northup's story before I watched this film but now i will never forget it and, if this does become an Oscar winner as so many have predicted, it will be one of the few cases in which that award ceremony got something absolutely right.