Unspeakable Abuse.

Rating: 3/10 (6 September 2014)

Solomon Northrup is a freeman with a wife and children, living in Saratoga, New York, in the years before the Civil War. He makes his living as a fiddler, and when he's invited to join a troupe for a gig in Washington, he agrees. In Washington, he's drugged by his partners, given a false identity, and sold down the river into slavery in Louisiana. After twelve years, he finds his way home.
I hate to say this but I found the movie lush but repellent. I can't imagine -- well, maybe I can -- that there are viewers who don't know what slavery in the South was like.
In addition, despite its being based on Northrup's memoirs, I thought the scenes of punishment, though well done, were overemphasized and sometimes unconvincing. For instance, the two men who take Northrup from Saratoga to Washington. They have dinner in an elegant Washington hotel, after which Northrup vomits in an alley and is put to bed by his companions, where he sleeps soundly until he wakes up manacled in a dungeon. I can believe his companions got Northrup drunk and sold him out, but drugged? It's a common movie device. The original "Mickey Finn", chloral hydrate, wasn't used as a hypnotic until 1869. Before that, there was nothing that could knock Northrup out. I wish the movie had been honest and simply shown him having a good time in the big city and overcelebrating.
That initial suspicion runs through the entire movie. Some of the events are eminently believable, others not. I can certainly believe the brutal beatings, rapes, destruction of families, and lynchings. But the director's camera lingers on them, far too long, long after we understand the import of the scene. You've seen lashes dealt out before, aboard sailing ships and on plantations, but you have never seen so many, nor have they lasted so long. It begins to seem as if the film intends not only to depict the brutality but to revel in it. It starts to look a little like a member of the emerging genre of torture porn.
I realize that criticizing a film like this isn't exactly politically correct, and yet we've seen it before, even if less lavishly displayed. It's been thirty years or more since "Roots." Except that here, the director has thrown in some sex -- full frontal female nudity, masturbation in the midst of misery -- just in case you find yourself bored with the atrocities. I have a similar problem with movies about the Nazi genocide. The subjects carry so much in the way of moral outrage that a simple-minded, commercial approach cheapens the tragedy.
The photography and wardrobe are just fine. The dialog is stilted, like "True Grit" with no wit. Apparently the antebellum South never heard of contractions like "don't" or "won't". "Slavery is an evil that should not be permitted." That's the way people wrote, in Spencerian script, not the way they spoke. The N word is used without restraint, but I give that a pass because it's evidently historically accurate.
I gave it an hour before I was too disgusted to go on. Yet, I think it's a valuable movie for the one in five Americans who can't name the country we achieved our independence from, according to a 2011 poll taken on the Fourth of July. Maybe they really DON'T know.