![]() ![]() ![]() In “Hunger” and “Shame,” McQueen presented arty images of extreme physical distress, namely, starvation and sex addiction. Tarantino delights in crafting cartoonish, pop-culture-infused mayhem, and his protagonists meet violence with violence. McQueen’s restrained, pictorial style contrasts with Quentin Tarantino’s revenge fantasy “Django Unchained,” about a freed slave who exacts bloody revenge on slaveholders circa 1858. She’s not very convincing, however, and you sense her cheery mask comes with unseen shackles. In one of the movie’s lightest scenes, she says turning a blind eye to her husband’s infidelity is a small price to pay for living in the manor house and being labor-exempt. ![]() His wife (Alfre Woodard) was once his slave, and she mentors Patsey. That said, Patsey gets whipped and the fiendish Mistress Epps (Sarah Paulson) disfigures her twice, suggesting that in her pitiable case physical and spiritual torment are indivisible.Įpps’s neighbor, Shaw, evidently sublimates his guilt by womanizing. The characters’ souls, something essential, remain intact. It also emphasizes for the viewer that what is being lacerated is not the victim’s entire self. Rather, this absence of faces signifies the slaves’ lack of humanity in the eyes of their owners. This isn’t a cop-out, particularly since ghastly sound effects and other visuals trigger ample empathetic immediacy. As a rule, the faces of those being brutalized are not shown while they’re being beaten. McQueen eschews the gratuitously graphic without flinching from the disturbing subject matter. Solomon faces an agonizing moral quandary that, if treated in an exploitative way, would repel instead it invites reflection. One pivotal sequence is so devastating you wonder how anyone could have survived it. The most incredible aspect of Northup’s story is that he lived to tell it. It examines the institution without reaching for a rhetorical whip, moral cudgel or anything designed to assuage ethical or aesthetic sensibilities. Based on the book Northup published in 1853 about his ordeal, it forcefully portrays the barbarity and perverse logic behind antebellum slavery. Sean Bobbitt, who photographed director Steve McQueen’s previous movies, “Hunger” and “Shame,” delivers evocative imagery throughout this carefully calibrated film. But be forewarned: even knowing that Solomon’s odyssey ends eventually, it is hard to find joy in this unsettling work. The film astonishes because it is so wrenching yet unsentimental, so devastating yet sober, so harrowing yet beautiful. Having determined it is fruitless to fight back or attempt an escape, he looks for a chance to send word home. Solomon gradually decides he must adopt a submissive demeanor, alter his manner of speech and stifle his talents and intellect in order to survive. One former overseer, who is made to pick cotton alongside Epps’s slaves, thinks so many whites in the slave milieu are unhinged or dissolute because “no man can whip another daily without tearing himself apart.” Identities on both sides are torn asunder. Epps is the most egregious example, but most every slave owner in the film seems to relish being cruel. The depraved mentality Solomon is up against can be described as viciousness bordering on the psychotic. Epps is sadistic and fixated on his young slave mistress Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o). But after clashing with an overseer on Ford’s sugarcane plantation, he is sent to the cotton estate of Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender). Northup is sold to William Ford of Louisiana (Benedict Cumberbatch), a relatively compassionate man. Thus begins the titular experience of 12 Years a Slave, a film based on a true story from antebellum America. It was a trap, however, and Northup was kidnapped and given a new identity: Platt Hamilton, runaway Georgia slave. In 1841 Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a black violinist living in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., with his wife and children, was invited by two white performers to join them on a lucrative circus tour. ![]()
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