Not a Film but a Portal into Our Nation's Past

Rating: 10/10 (24 March 2014)

My first movie review for IMDb. I was so moved by this film that I am compelled to write about it. The acting was phenomenal, the cinematography (shots of nature and sky, plantation homes, it's beauty surrounding so many horrors) exquisite, the long shots of particular scenes that amplified the feelings they invoked- straying away from contemporary films that change shots every 2 seconds (or less)? These long shots mimicked life, what the viewer would really see if he or she stood witness to the atrocities. Based on the true life of Solomon Northup, a man who was captured and stripped of his rights, escaping 12 years later and writing his story: Solomon is an educated man, exquisitely played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, from New York in the late 1800s, who lives happily with his wife and two children. He is kidnapped and taken on a "reverse underground railroad", eventually deposited in the deep South, his identity beaten out of him, watching as others in captivity like him are abused and murdered for trying to escape, speaking, for following orders, after crying for stolen children. We follow this man from plantation to plantation, sometimes picking cotton, other times building homes, hacking sugar canes, etc. etc. meeting different Masters and their wives. Through Solomon's eyes we see the system of slavery that entrenches every character, man, woman, child, black, white. Solomon keeps trying to survive long enough to escape and see his family again, back in New York, but as he so eloquently explains to another man while in captivity who suggests he "keep your head low, don't let them (those keeping them in captivity) know who you really are" (lest he is brutalized or murdered for knowing more than a slave should know), "I don't want to survive. I want to live." The final Master before our protagonist is released after more than a decade in captivity exemplifies so many conflicting character points. A drunk Master, unpredictable, charmed by his slaves (rousing them from sleep many a night to entertain him in the parlor, dancing to songs that he demanded our protagonist play on his violin) like a person who collects Pokemon cards, picking up or discarding at whim, while Master wife looks on in disgust and contempt. He is charmed enough by his slaves that his wife, violently wracked by jealousy when her Master husband singles out a slave girl and rapes her every night, threatens to leave him often and questions his loyalty to his own white race. He's superstitious and admissions that there is no "intrinsic truth or justice, just what is financially his". This character hates himself for liking his slaves, for lusting after one, and his jealousy when his chosen rape slave produces soap given to her by another plantation owner moves him to whip her within an inch of her life. My debt, my money, my property. His anti-thesis is the Brad Pitt character, "What is good for one is good for all. Laws change. What if one day our rights are lost and we (the whites) become the slaves?" The script is powerful. The words heavy and time appropriate and illuminating.