This weekend’s movie viewing included two Oscar nominated films, including 12 Years a Slave. Great cast, tough violence, and a compelling story make this one of the leading candidates for Best Picture.
12 Years a Slave (Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Lupita Nyong’o, Paul Dano, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Giamatti, Brad Pitt) – Easily one of the top movies of the year, 12 Years a Slave is a testament to man’s inhumanity of man. Director Steve McQueen, largely known for his short films, spares no souls in his gritty tale of a kidnapped northern African American who finds himself on plantations in the South during pre-Civil War Days.
Chiwetel Ejiofor, the British born actor best known for Inside Man, Redbelt, Salt and Children of Men, delivers a commanding performance as Solomon Northrup, a professional violinist from Saratoga, New York, who becomes just another exploited, humiliated slave subject to human degradation during a hideous time in our nation’s history.
Based on the book by Northrup authored in the mid-1800s, the film doesn’t cover new ground but it pounds home the horrors of slavery in a way that is gritty, ugly, painful, and embarrassing. For an independent film, 12 Years a Slave is surprisingly grand. It looks like an expensive, epic production. In the hands of Steven Spielberg, it would have been a $200 million mega-pic, but McQueen uses his limited funding adeptly. A first-rate cast led by Ejiofor (who will be familiar to moviegoers even if you don’t know his name), Michael Fassbender (who was in McQueen’s Shame), and Lupita Nyong’o (Mexican born, Kenyan raised and Yale educated) delivers powerful performances reminiscent of Spielberg’s Amistad (Ejiofor’s first film). All were nominated for Oscars. Add cameos by Brad Pitt as a Canadian doing contract work, Paul Giamatti as a slave trader, Paul Dano as a plantation manager, Alfre Woodard as a black mistress who rose to prominence, and Sarah Paulson as a rich, heartless plantation wife and you have a wonderful ensemble. Special recognition should go to Benedict Cumberbatch (whose impressive 2013 body of work included August: Osage County, The Fifth Estate as Julian Assange, the most recent Hobbit and as the villain in Star Trek Into Darkness), who portrays a plantation owner and the only southerner portrayed with any sense of humanity.
There are three relatively minor faults I could find with the film that makes the movie imperfect, even if it is the leading candidate for Best Picture. First, as I just mentioned, virtually every southerner is one-dimensional. They are cruel, inhuman, sometimes oblivious, and ruthless. There isn’t a sympathizer to be seen. Secondly, writer John Ridley’s (Red Tails, Three Kings, U Turn) dialogue is too high brow, too educated. Yes, Solomon is an educated man as are some of the cast. But the dialogue is almost Elizabethan, even among the uneducated slaves and poor southerners. For me, it was distracting. Nonetheless, he earned a deserved writing nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Lastly, Michael Fassbender’s character, Edwin Epp’s, is a bit over the top. He did it very well but I wished he had toned it down just a bit.
The subject matter alone carved this film’s path to the Academy Award nomination. It is a better film than The Butler, another predominantly black film that was snubbed in all of the awards contests this year. The brutality will make some squeamish, too. But this raw view of the pre-Civil War South is a film everyone should see.