A tough watch that's worth watching

Rating: Null/10 (7 January 2014)

Just returned home from seeing 12 Years a Slave with a friend, and this is one of those powerful movies that has me thinking about the film, the real story on which it was based, as though it were an event in my own life. If Steve McQueen directed no other film but this one his reputation as a director would be notable (I'm not familiar with his other films.)
The hook of the story is that Solomon is not just "another" slave—he's a kidnapped free man from the North, shipped to southern plantation life to line someone's pocket. By the time the film is over, you realize, it's a horror for human society that it takes a special case to draw us to this story and to witnessing the wretched immorality of slavery, when every case is equally wretched and hellacious—regardless of the birth or status of those made slaves. The moral wasting of those who enslave them is a full element of the piece.
12 Years has the effect of making the audience feel as though we have been made captive along with Solomon. It's never prettified or softened and the ugly self-serving rationalizing of slave economies, slave masters and mistresses is omnipresent in the film. The horrors are bearable because we know Solomon must survive or his book of the same title as the film wouldn't have been written and his story told.
Brad Pitt as producer cast himself in an unglamourous but positive role in the film—one of the few white characters to act honourably.
See it with company, not alone. Just as with Solomon, we want a little less solitude to go through this.