Mediocre attempt at the slavery story

Rating: 6/10 (23 April 2014)

This film had the opportunity of being the Schindler's List of American slavery, but it fell short. The story was engaging enough, but the filmmakers took just enough liberties with the facts in the real story to plunge the film into mediocrity. To begin with, there is a completely unnecessary sex scene in the opening that adds a non-sequitur to the true story and immediately sets the film off on the wrong foot.
The film lacks character development. According to the real story, Northup's first master was much kinder than depicted in the film, and his second Master far more demented than what was depicted. These are golden opportunities for a filmmaker to show these extremes in human nature to tell the story and reality of slavery, in the same way Schindler's list took the opportunity to show the range of human character and experience during the holocaust. But in this film all the southern women are painted as cold and jealous, and all plantation owners as deluded or drunks.
This film wasn't about why the institution of slavery is bad, it is how it worked and the extremes of how people behaved within the institution of slavery. The film could have been so much more powerful, even if the original story is, as I suspect, highly suspect of being 100% accurate. After all, it was quickly ghost written in 1853 for an abolitionist demographic. Regardless of whether everything happened to this one man in 12 years or not, all the stories are certainly true, even if not all experienced by Solomon Northup.
Historical accuracy is called into question when it comes to many of the other film's faults, from the overuse of formal Victorian language, dirty clothes being worn by actors with fluorescent white teeth, stained glass front doors in Saratoga Springs in 1841, and plantation chairs from British East India on plantation verandahs... too many things that suggest to me a superficial attempt at historical accuracy.
After the book was published in 1853, some felt that Solomon Northup was part of a conspiracy to collect money from slave traders by using himself as bait and that the money collected would be divided among the three men, but then everything went wrong and Northup ended up a slave. THAT is a fascinating premise to begin this tale, and the film would then tell Northup's story within this context. There was more opportunity to do this story than the watered down version of the 1853 story. Too bad.