A Painful History to Come to Terms with

Rating: 9/10 (3 March 2014)

Congratulations to 12 Years a Slave on winning the Oscar Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress in the Oscar. The movie is based on a tragic true story of Solomon Northup, a free man who was kidnapped and enslaved in the deep south of America before the Civil War. While we rejoice at the achievement of this production, we should not forget the agony millions of slaves suffered while building America.
This is a very difficult and disturbing movie to watch because of the slow tempo depicting the heavy and ugly reality that actually happened more than a century ago. All the torture, helplessness, abuse, and betrayal caused a minor headache. The last movie I felt so upset but had to finish watching was Schindler's List. There were so many moments that I wanted to just leave the theater.
But I also want to stay and see what happened. I know Northup's (Chiwetel Ejiofor) ordeal would end and I want to find out how he sticks it out and return to freedom. The film opens with his determination to reach out to the outside world – by boiling fruit juice to make ink to write on a precious piece of paper. But it is not until the latter half of the movie that this scene reappears. By then he has almost spent 12 years as a slave in a plantation under a mad couple who routinely abused their slaves.
Solomon Northup's misfortune started in 1841 when the talented violinist was invited to perform at a circus in Washington DC. He drank with his acquaintance and got really drunk. But the time he woke up, he was chained up and locked in a cell where the Capitol was seen. He and other black people were herded on a boat, shipped along the Red River to the south, stripped and sold like a cattle.
Throughout the film, we witness how threatening life can be to a slave, whether they work in the sugar cane field or cotton field. It is no Gone with the Wind, and definitely not Unchained Django. As meticulous described in Solomon Northup's memoir, slaves work day in and day out without knowing what will happen to them in the next minute: they can be physically or sexually abused or be sold to other monstrous plantation owners anytime. They are treated as property which can be freely sold. It seems to be a massive psychotic society where slaves were not respected at all. Being illiterate and without knowledge of the outside world, many just put their head down to survive. Some, like our heroine Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o who won the Best Supporting Actress for this role), do not even want to survive but also lack the courage to end their own life.
Yet in this hopeless and helpless situation, Solomon does not only want to survive, "I want to live." He exhibits enormous determination to leave this situation and return to his family in the north. He never loses hope despite failures and threats around him. He fights back. He attempts to escape. He asks a white slave for help only to find out he is betrayed: he tries all he can to return to freedom.
Since Solomon is literate, he can articulate and record his mundane and tortured life on the plantation after he regains his freedom. Think of all the other unheard and unrecorded horror stories. Award winning script writer John Ridley based his script, many lines verbatim, on Northup's memoir. Armed with this capturing script by John Ridley, director Steve McQueen gathers an excellent ensemble of cast to relive this unflattering history and forces us to reflect on what we have done to our fellow human beings and how noble some people are despite the cruel circumstances.
The sound effects, or the lack of it, is haunting as we witness the slaves' hardship: when Solomon was hanged on a tree, tiptoeing the mud right beneath him under the boiling sun; when Patsey was whipped by Northup, we only hear the whip wheezing and her screaming. According to Northup's memoir, when his master Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender) took over the whip, he hit 10 times harder than Northup himself. That prolonged scene is tormenting to watch and provoke you to wonder how can a person do this to another. She, a hardworking woman who yields more cotton than the men, is already abused sexually in addition to being the source of jealousy from Mistress Epps (Sarah Epps).
This abuse of power reminds me of the Stanford Prison Experiment initiated by Dr Philip Zimbardo in the 1970s. Once university students were assigned a powerful role they did horrible things to the prisoners. That experiment was aborted after only six days but slavery went on for decades in the US.
Although the Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1776 which states that "All men are created equal," there were slave trade in even the capital! America is such a hypocrite society.
It is sad that Solomon's persecution against his abductors did not materialize and his last days were unknown. African Americans has come a long way, from slaves to the civil war to Rosa Parks. They built America but their effort was not commemorated and it was not until Martin Luther King then they are more equal and finally there is Barack Obama. This movie would mean so much to the American society. Very serious and very heavy but so brutally real.
More stories like this should be told. Not just the glamorous Gone with the Wind, heroic Django Unchained, and the entertaining Butler. It is high time we face our past. For without know the past, we would never understand how and where we would go forward. A must watch for those who care for humanity.