Hybrid Book Review - The London Mail

[johnkarls]

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The London Mail – 1/9/2014

Brutal but brilliant: This remarkable retelling of the evils of slavery is hard to watch - but you MUST see 12 Years A Slave, says our film critic
By Brian Viner

With the endorsement of ten Bafta nominations, and with leading man Chiwetel Ejiofor an odds-on favourite to win the Oscar for Best Actor, 12 Years A Slave arrives in our cinemas already with a mighty reputation. It is richly deserved.

I have seen it twice now, and on both occasions it has managed to enthral and appal in just about equal measure.

I can’t think of a finer, more affecting cinematic account of the culture of slavery in the yet-to-be United States, but I can think of many worse, from DW Griffith’s pioneering but racist Birth Of A Nation to Steven Spielberg’s worthy but laboured Amistad.

It should be a source of tremendous pride that both Ejiofor and the director Steve McQueen are British, just as last week’s big release, Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom, has a British director (Justin Chadwick) and two British stars (Idris Elba and Naomie Harris).

The money behind these films might be mostly U.S. dollars, but the talent is sterling.

Like the Mandela film, 12 Years A Slave draws its chronicle of racial hatred and bitter injustice from an autobiographical book, but in this case a book that fell into obscurity for the best part of a century after causing a sensation when it was first published in 1853.

Solomon Northup was a black man born into freedom in New York State in 1808. He was a happily married father, well-educated, worldly, an accomplished musician and reasonably well-to-do when, in 1841, he was enticed to Washington DC by two men who offered him a job for a couple of weeks in their circus, playing the violin.

It transpired they had lured him with a view to selling him into slavery in the Deep South.

Slaves could no longer be imported from Africa, but instead there was a steady trade in kidnapping free men and women from the North.

Northup was summarily given the name Platt and sold for $1,000 to a Louisiana plantation owner called William Ford.

Ford (played splendidly by the ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch) was an unusually benevolent slave-owner, and McQueen uses him to convey the significant message that fundamentally decent men, as well as the irredeemably depraved, can embody an evil system.

Ford employed an ignorant, vicious overseer, Tibeats (Paul Dano in fine weaselly form).

After Northup, pushed to the end of his tether, attacked Tibeats, he only narrowly escaped being lynched and had to be sold on to another plantation owner, but this time a man of sadistic brutality, Edwin Epps (a quite electrifyingly hateful Michael Fassbender).

It was from Epps’s estate, after years of suffering, that Northup was eventually freed following the intervention of a Canadian abolitionist, Samuel Bass (Brad Pitt).

That’s the essence of the story, and Northup’s original account, written in just five months after his release, was highly influential in generating opposition to slavery, a movement that continued to gather momentum throughout the 1850s and helped provoke the American Civil War.

It might, in fact, be one of the most important books of which few of us had ever heard until McQueen resolved to adapt it.

Despite the celebrity that Northup enjoyed until his death sometime in the 1860s or 1870s (nobody knows exactly when), it is moving to think of the millions, 150 years on, who will now become familiar with his name. It is high time his story was told again.

In doing so, McQueen pulls no punches. In the film’s two most memorably intense scenes, his camera lingers almost defiantly on unspeakable pain and degradation.

The first is after Northup has nearly been hanged by Tibeats. Instead he is left in the noose for hours on end, desperately keeping the toes of his tattered shoes in contact with the mud beneath, to keep his neck from breaking. It would be interesting to know how many cinema-goers find themselves instinctively flexing their feet in empathy, reaching for the non-existent mud. I did.

The other, even more harrowing scene sees the plantation’s champion cotton-picker, Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), being tied to a tree and flayed nearly to death.

Epps, who regularly rapes her and even while doing so lurches between lust and hatred, at first gives the job to Northup, then, with his spiteful wife (Sarah Paulson) looking on, completes it himself.

The camera is unflinching, Nyong’o’s performance remarkable. And while the film’s very title bespeaks an end to Northup’s enslavement, for Patsey there is no hope. Hers is the most tragic predicament of all.

Unlike Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, set in neighbouring Mississippi around the same time, there is no light relief and no satisfying retribution.

And yet, despite being almost unrelentingly grim, 12 Years A Slave is a thunderously powerful testament to the strength and obduracy of the human spirit.

When he is first robbed of his freedom, a fellow captive advises Northup what he must do to survive. But Northup replies: ‘I don’t want to survive, I want to live.’

It is a credo that has sustained many brave people in terrible circumstances.

The script, by John Ridley, brilliantly evokes the language of mid-19th-century America without it ever being challenging on the ear, and the performances, led by Ejiofor, are uniformly excellent.

But the real triumph is McQueen’s. His previous features, Hunger and Shame, were accomplished, daring films, but this has elevated him to a new level. Quite possibly an Academy Award-winning one.