OC Screenwriters Association

“12 Years a Slave” is perhaps the most important film produced since we began watching “motion pictures” in the penny slots on boardwalks, carnivals, and city emporiums in the 1880’s.  It is based on the 1853 memoir by Solomon Northrop, a free man from Saratoga, New York, who was tricked, captured and made a slave for twelve horrendous years. Northrop is played by actor Chiwetel Ejiofor in a performance done with such magnificence it removes the actor from the role, for what is memorable is the depth of character and the story his work tells us of a terrible human experience.  

 

Movies are entertainment first, entertainment that provides two hours of escape from our lives and allows us to enter the lives of characters on the big screen. Movies involve us in the adventure of the story and the ramifications of issues raised, whether comedy or drama, just as those first penny slots involved its first viewers in the real life and death battle of a cobra and a mongoose. 

 

However, there are some movies since film began that have been epic in meaning and revelation of the human experience. From “Birth of a Nation” to “Schindler’s List,” and more, these films have been important films because they affected and/or changed or challenged generations of mindset on issues, i.e., the Ku Klux Klan in “Birth of a Nation,” and the Holocaust in “Schindler’s List.” Both films took us past what the public had settled as the comfortable mindset on those subjects, a mindset that didn’t disrupt our then present-day lives, and those films forced us to make moral decisions on life and death questions.  

 

12 Years a Slave” presents the absolute truth of slavery’s work - the humiliation and murder of the body, mind, spirit, and soul of the slave. Its portrayal of the sick minds and perverted bodies of slave owners(they couldn’t have possibly possessed a soul) is the true story of a brutality that shames mankind. It is a film where the lack of humanity in the minds, words, and actions of slave owners and slave sellers at that time, the common white Southerners, is displayed in their treatment of black people as animals and beasts, and worse. 

 

And in spite of its most atrocious horror, it is entertaining first, endearing us to the characters, and forcing us to go along for the most riveting, cruel journey we have ever experienced with a film, and possibly in our lives, as these people we come to love are abused beyond imagination, and we sit with disbelief, hoping for escape, for help, for even a minute of peace for the people we meet – for they are that first – people - people who become slaves. And we watch their lives drained of life by the mean, sadistic lifestyle of the pre-Civil War South, with not a minute lived without drama and fear. There were no good masters.  

 

The film is based on the autobiography of Solomon Northrop, the free man who led a rather middle class life in Saratoga, N.Y., a man who owned a home, had a wife and two children, and who played the violin professionally. That was until two con men tricked him into joining their musical troupe for a few weeks, and used that to lure him to Washington DC, where they sold him to a slaver. And from there, the story goes to several plantations, from horror to horror, from story to story, and reveals the absolute viciousness of both the men and women who owned slaves. 

 

Yet with all the repulsion of the actions in this story, from verbal abuse beyond description, to whippings to rape to murder to lynching, we feel these things but don’t see the actual blows most of the time. But the way the scenes of misery are shot, from raising an arm with a blunt club, to the sound of wood breaking on a woman or man’s head, we don’t realize we haven’t seen it,  we believe we have seen it because we felt it the shocking horror of the abuse in our imagination, and more importantly, in our spirit. 

The man who brought this to the screen, director Steve McQueen, is a black man from Amsterdam; an American director could not have done this without the salacious episodes necessary for such a film in America. And while the violence is perhaps the most horrendous in film history, and committed against women and children as well as men, it is hardly salacious, but is in fact so truthful and horrifying that the viewer is stunned and shocked, and that is the intent of the director and actors and screenwriter – to share the horror of perhaps the worst episode of human degradation and death in world history. That is a large statement, but the Holocaust, as awful, sick, and perverted as it was, had 6 million victims, American slavery had numbers far beyond that. But more than that, it forces us to feel, to know, to cry, to hurt, for there is no escape from the awful truth, because it is a story we live through - barely. 

 

McQueen, who speaks with a British accent, said that when he discovered the book by Northrop he read it and his first thought was it had to be made into a movie. But his second thought was that people everywhere knew of the “Diary of Anne Frank,” yet no one he sought out had heard of “!2 Years a Slave.” McQueen felt it was just as important, because it shared the experience of when it was so fresh in Northrop’s mind. 

 

And McQueen made this film in what I would call a grand literary style, like “Grand Hotel,” and “On the Waterfront,” so classy, so big, with ideas and themes beyond our known human experience. It is one of those perfect films, where every piece he directed comes together with flawless precision – from the screenplay, to the actors being magnificently intense, to the vehicle of our journey   - the cinematographer’s lens - perhaps the most important piece in any film. McQueen’s direction to the cinematographer was to force us along for the uncomfortable trip, and we are expecting to be released from the brutality at every new scene, until finally the lens wears down our hope, just as we see happen quickly to so many characters in the film – slaves - becoming attached to us in body and soul. It is an enrapturing experience and a pin could be heard dropping on the theatre floor. 

The film’s music is by Oscar winner, Hans Zimmer, with both a score and songs that make the journey an unconditional experience that possesses us, haunts us, and Zimmer builds the tension and pain of every scene with his edgy work, as the score brings to us the realization that the music of the times was an entertainment for the whites, but a sad escape for slaves, sung during hard work, death, and hopes to be with the Lord. 

 

The cinematography is by Sean Bobbitt. And how effective are his shots, shots that linger in scenes when the horror of the moment is over, but he won’t allow us to move on, he leaves us there, swamped in the truth, forced to face and accept it. Brilliant is his reasoning. His method makes the story so powerful, intense, horrible, unbelievable, tragic - all at once - with his nuanced shots that capture the essence of the souls of the characters as well as the depth of cruelty in slavery and the misery of the sweaty existence in the South.  

 

The acting is beyond first class – I would give everyone in the film an Oscar. We are first introduced to a person we probably do not want to travel with, Solomon Northrup, as portrayed so magnificently by Chiwetel Ejiofor, who has played leads in movies as varied as “Redbelt,” “2012,” and “Amistad.” Here, he portrays Northrop at first as slightly too refined, which was admitted to proudly by Northrup in his memoir.  That slight affectation makes his fall from all that is good and beautiful so much more abject and profound. His fear and his disbelief are so well acted, I believe any of us would have the same reactions if that was our life, and it was happening to us – there is no moment where we can disagree with his character – or any other for that matter. 

 

The acting is brilliant, from Paul Giamatti, Alfre Woodard, Benedict Comberbatch, Michael Fassbender, Dineen Taylor, Paul Dano, Sarah Paulson, even Brad Pitt, who also was one of the film’s producers, and many more in roles so small and so varied but such essential roles that paint the portrait of hate in America that is still with us and has not been fully resolved by the national conscience.  They all appear so natural in their roles even through the shocking words they speak, but truthful to the standards of the times. The belief that slavery ended in 1865 is a lie, a subjective myth. Slavery’s ramifications and animosities are still with us, and the reflection of those ideas portrayed by these actors surely is as recognizable as the hate that still burns in America, disguised in self-righteous pontificates, who claim to save America by denying compassion to the poor. 

 

But while every actor is magnificent, the work of first time film actress, Lupita Nyong’o will shock you, knock you out, there are not words to describe the power and beauty of her performance as she portrays Patsey, a slave woman used and abused and beaten and raped at will by an owner. She begs Ejiofor’s character to hold her head under water till she can no longer breath as she is too much a coward to do it herself as an escape from the life as chattel, a scene that births within us a battle of emotions – a sorrow for her and great anger within that has grown through the course of the film to a hatred for these awful “masters.”  Nyong’o’s work alone is worth the price of admission, and if she doesn’t receive an Oscar for her work, the system is not worth having. Nyong’o can take you along on a moment of useless laughs with a neighboring black woman who has married the slave owner, to extreme pain from her master’s brutality,  and she does it in a brief second with a glance, her eyes so dead, her simple statement of a woman without hope, reluctantly existing.

 

The screenplay is by John Ridley, an author who has written several bestselling novels in addition to screenplays, including “Red Tails” and Oliver Stone’s “U Turn”.  He took Solomon’s book and wrote it into a story that could be filmed and yet rush at us like a knife stabbing our hearts with the absolute misery and condemnation of what happened to Northrop. Ridley’s beautiful choice of words and actions, so aptly carried through by the actors, the music, cinematography, set design, every aspect of the film, all work off his script that has brought to us again the importance of the word “slavery,” a word long hidden and put on our national back shelf. Ridley is brilliant in his use of dialogue, perhaps even spectacular.  His characters are real and what they speak and do is truth in not only that time but in this day also.  For in this time of politicians who seek to deprive people of voting rights, of food stamps, of obtaining work visas, and whose lack of depth is seen in their shallow slogans of hate on FoxNews, it is a time for America to choose right or wrong – what is right is moral, and anything else is evil, it was true then, it is true now – truth doesn’t die, truth doesn’t lie.

 

Effective and cutting is Ridley’s display of how slave owners preached the gospel to slaves, and then beat them, raped them, murdered them, subjected them to all manner of abuse, and yet claimed to be Christians.  Slavery happened in a time in our country’s history and cost us millions of lives in the Civil War, but the issues of slavery have never died, and Ted Cruz types and his ilk in the Tea Party, are those that espouse slavery – albeit not in physical entrapment, but of another kind, and just as horrible – a degradation of humans, reducing them to items on a budget line. And they shout the words of Christ, forgetting so easily he stated that what we do to the least we do to him.

 

If I sound as if I merely liked the movie that is hardly the truth - the truth is that this movie will touch the core of your being, if you let it, it will give you a beautiful story inhabited by people we love and hate. But when the film ends, its truth has come too close to abandon it in a movie theatre, and it needs to be shouted from our hearts, and lived in our walk, for darkness and hate is upon this world again, there is no safe place, and it is our time, our moment, to challenge evil and stand for what is moral and good and compassionate and right, and to prove love conquers all.