Daily Archives: Friday, May 22, 2015

  • 12 Years a Slave

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steve McQueen (2013)

    Solomon Northup was an exceptional man.  Born in 1808 in New York State, Northup was a ‘free negro’ (the legal status of any African-American who was not a slave until emancipation in the 1860s).  In 1841 he was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana, where he worked on plantations for twelve years.   Kidnapping of this kind was ‘not terribly common, in terms of numbers’, according to Professor David Blight, Director of the Center for the Study of Slavery at Yale University (I don’t know what the numbers were).  Northup regained his freedom in 1853, returned to his family in New York, and wrote a memoir, Twelve Years a Slave, which sold well.  He gave public lectures about his experiences, in support of the abolitionist movement, but disappeared into obscurity.  It’s not known when, where or how he died.   (Wikipedia suggests 1863, with a question mark, citing African Autobiographers: A Sourcebook, by Emmanuel Sampath Nelson.)

    Solomon Northup’s exceptionalness is a problem with Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (the screenplay by John Ridley is adapted from Northup’s memoir).  Some critics have described McQueen’s approach to his subject as objective and aestheticised (Stephanie Zacharek dislikes the film mainly for this reason).  I don’t get this:  although the tone is controlled, 12 Years a Slave contains illustrations of slavery in mid-nineteenth century America which are inescapably graphic.  When Solomon is first captured, a young mother Eliza (Adepero Oduye) in the same consignment of slaves for sale is separated from her children; on the Louisiana plantation which becomes the main site of the film’s action, a young slave Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o) is on the receiving end of variously appalling treatment by the plantation owner Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), who regularly rapes Patsey, and his jealous wife Mary (Sarah Paulson).  What happens to Eliza and to Patsey is emotionally powerful; so too are the images of naked slaves being appraised by prospective buyers, of black corpses twitching after being hanged.  But the dead and naked slaves don’t have the status of individual characters.  Steve McQueen concentrates so much on Solomon that the fate of other African-Americans in the story is rendered unimportant.  This tendency of the film reaches a climax in a funeral chorus of slaves after the death of one of their number.  At first Solomon is so deeply angry he refuses to sing but he does so eventually, strongly and with heartfelt anguish.  Once he joins in, the others in the choir might be people in a documentary.  The camera has eyes only for Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon, and he is really acting.

    Ejiofor’s unusual good looks, especially his distinctive profile, emphasise Solomon’s difference from the other slaves.   Of course he is (as far as the viewer of 12 Years a Slave knows) different in at least one important way:  he can read and write but, as a slave, isn’t allowed to do either.  I realised, somewhat guiltily, that I felt this did indeed make Solomon’s situation exceptionally appalling; whether it is or not, I don’t think McQueen makes the fate of most of the other slaves – as people – matter enough.  Patsey is just about the sole exception:  Lupita Nyong’o has an emotional transparency both piercing and resonant.  It’s striking that, like Ejiofor, she has looks which are more African than American (he was born in London to Nigerian parents; she is Kenyan).  Chiwetel Ejiofor’s portrait of Louis Lester, the leader of a black jazz band in London in the 1930s, was the most interesting feature of last year’s BBC television serial Dancing on the Edge, by Stephen Poliakoff.  Ejiofor made Lester not just an elegant but a proud man; the racial prejudice that he encountered had the effect of intensifying this pride – his exasperation showed itself as something approaching haughtiness.  In 12 Years a Slave Ejiofor is good, in the early days of Solomon’s captivity, at expressing his horror of losing his individuality but there isn’t the slightest risk of that happening within the film, given the literal focus on Ejiofor.  And Solomon, in circumstances where esprit de corps must have counted for a lot, doesn’t have any relationship with any of the other slaves, except, eventually, Patsey.  Ejiofor is eloquent throughout (he has a fine trudge) and very moving in Solomon’s final homecoming but his situation is made too uniquely intolerable.  In an article in The Guardian on the weekend 12 Years a Slave opened in Britain, Sarah Churchwell suggested that the real Solomon Northup might have been a bit of a chancer (and that this could have led to his being kidnapped).  Ejiofor could have done to be a bit more light-hearted, a bit less dignified in the early scenes in Saratoga which describe the life from which Solomon is going to be torn away.

    In the small role of Mistress Harriet Shaw, a former slave who has now risen somewhat within the local caste system (I assume the appellation ‘Mistress’ has a double meaning), Alfre Woodard is splendid.  She conveys a quietly vindictive satisfaction at having profited from her situation but it’s a satisfaction with an edge of self-disgust:  Woodard suggests an almost sarcastic gentility which masks fury.  Sarah Churchwell’s article also quoted Solomon Northup’s view that white slave-owners were not necessarily bad people but were themselves trapped in an evil system.   This is no doubt true but it’s relatively difficult to dramatise and there’s a natural temptation for the actors to play the whiteys as thoroughly nasty pieces of work unless the script presents them as explicitly divided characters.  As Solomon’s first owner, the sincerely pious, conscience-riven William Ford, Benedict Cumberbatch has an advantage, and takes it:  his Reverend Ford is a convincing mixture of decency and pusillanimity.  As a racist carpenter on Ford’s plantation (Solomon Northup, in his life as a free man, was a skilled carpenter, as well as a fiddle-player), Paul Dano has a strong bit singing the taunting ‘Run, Nigger, Run’ but he seems obvious casting as a psychotic cry baby; Paul Giamatti – especially so soon after Saving Mr Banks – has more shocking impact as the slave trader, in spite of the obvious irony of his character’s name (Theophilus Freeman).  David Denby, David Edelstein and Stephanie Zacharek all seem uncomfortable with Michael Fassbender’s portrait of the loco Edwin Epps.  The character – a sadistic religious maniac with a drink problem – is too much but Fassbender’s charismatic inventiveness rises to the challenge of it:  Epps is both a vicious representative of the system of slavery and a disturbingly disturbed individual.   There’s a brilliantly filmed sequence in which, chasing after Solomon, Epps first slips in pig shit then trips over a low fence and falls heavily:  at the end of this, Fassbender expresses a strange, masochistic exhilaration.  It’s shocking when he makes Epps’s whipping of Patsey as rhythmically sexual as his intercourse with her – and Fassbender is chilling in a quiet embrace of Solomon:  you think this will be a prelude to an attack on him too but Epps holds back.

    John Ridley’s screenplay is, for the most part, admirably clear but I didn’t quite get the balance of power between Epps and his wife Mary.   When Mary first complains about her husband’s relationship with Patsey, he mutters that he’ll send Mary back to where she came from; later on, she seems to wear the trousers.  David Edelstein’s suggestion that Sarah Paulson’s playing is more interesting than Fassbender’s is baffling.  Fassbender makes you realise that Patsey really matters to Edwin Epps even though his desire is perverted.  Paulson’s Mary doesn’t suggest any feeling for her husband so her victimisation of Patsey comes across as simply and unforgivably sadistic.  David Edelstein is, though, sensitive to the risk of appearing cool towards the shocking, extraordinary true story that Steve McQueen is telling; this is more than can be said for Stephanie Zacharek.  I’ve a natural resistance to films or television with easy villains and which aim to stun you into submission by the horrors that they present – to accuse you, if you resist the piece, of not being able to take the truth of what’s on the screen.  But Zacharek’s review of 12 Years a Slave suggests that she’s primed to resist:  it’s worrying that the only actors she has a good word for are those playing good characters – Ejiofor, Cumberbatch and Brad Pitt, as Samuel Bass, another white carpenter (and the polar opposite to the Paul Dano character):  Bass comes to work on the Epps plantation and risks his life to help Solomon regain his freedom.   In fact, Pitt (who also co-produced) is the worst piece of casting:  Bass may be Canadian but, with Pitt playing him, he’s the US cavalry.

    Although I have reservations about 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen’s direction is variously impressive and he’s greatly aided by his cinematographer Sean Bobbitt.  They create images juxtaposing the beauties of the natural world with the viciousness of people in it:  the idea is obvious but these compositions have a suppleness that transcends the underlying conception.  Other images have a sensuousness which is compelling – sometimes in its inappropriateness:  McQueen appears to have a visual artist’s fascination with the terrible effects of the whip on human flesh.  Shapes that first seem to be inanimate objects are revealed to be a character’s head or the folds of his shirt.  The combination of sounds – the slaves’ singing, the cicadas, wind blowing through trees – is no less extraordinary (and the use of Hans Zimmer’s score is sensibly rationed).  McQueen still has a tendency to overdo extraordinariness.  When Solomon is left hanging from a tree for ages, you can’t help thinking of the record-breaking two-shot in Hunger, even though this sequence is more sophisticated – the horror, as Solomon tries to keep his feet in contact with the muddy ground, is contrasted with the peacefulness of the day.  I could have done without the camera’s sharp focus on a piece of soap at the end of the scene in which Patsey is flogged.  (She left the plantation – and went, presumably, to Mistress Shaw – to get some soap because Mary Epps refused to supply it.)  This film is a much larger storytelling challenge than Hunger or Shame but McQueen’s narrative control is very sure.  The relentlessness of tone is gruelling but fair enough.  Any diversion from it would feel like an evasion.

    12 January 2014

  • 10 Rillington Place

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Fleischer (1971)

    This was the first X-certificate film I ever saw in the cinema, in the summer of 1971.   Ludovic Kennedy’s book 10 Rillington Place, on which Clive Exton’s screenplay is based (Kennedy appears in the credits as ‘Technical Adviser’), was first published in 1961.  I’d read Kennedy’s book – updated to take account of the 1966 official inquiry into the Christie-Evans murders and the posthumous pardon for Timothy Evans that followed – with great interest, and a new edition was published to coincide with the film’s release.  I didn’t want to see any picture I wasn’t old enough to see:  I wanted to see just this one.  I was impressed, and especially by John Hurt as Evans, but I’m not sure that I’d ever seen 10 Rillington Place in its entirety again until 2013.  Although the story they tell was notorious enough in this country to attract audiences, Clive Exton and the director Richard Fleischer were still faced with a tricky commercial assignment.   Should the piece be a horror film about the serial killer ‘monster’ John Reginald Halliday Christie or a cautionary tale about the perils of capital punishment (which had very recently been abolished in Britain, after an initial five-year suspension beginning in 1965) or a human drama?  10 Rillington Place turns out to be all three and, thanks to the film-makers’ skill in balancing these elements, it’s a good movie.

    This is in spite of its getting off on the wrong foot and, in doing so, making what turns out to be a dramatically limiting choice.   The ‘monster’ angle is the easiest way to draw the audience in, and this is what Fleischer and Exton decide to focus on:  the film’s opening describes Christie’s murder of Muriel Eady (the second of his eight known victims) in 1944.  The writing and staging of the killing is realistic and frightening but the immediate exposure of what lies behind Christie’s creepy sociability means there’s nothing much more to reveal about him and, unlike the Kennedy book, the film doesn’t attempt to explain Christie’s psychopathology.   The meticulously drab settings are anything but lurid, there’s no scary music (Fleischer uses John Dankworth’s score only for the opening titles) and Richard Attenborough’s interpretation of Christie is painstaking, but he’s still essentially a bogeyman.  Fortunately, once the Timothy Evans story gets underway, the human drama aspect takes over; because this aspect is so strong 10 Rillington Place never needs to present its anti-hanging message too explicitly.

    Attenborough as Christie is often a shade too theatrical – both in relation to how the other parts are played and in the sense that he comes over as a figure of evil drawn from film history rather than real life, which allows a measure of security for the audience.   The piggy look (very different from the real Christie’s gauntness), the sinister spectacles, the carefully produced voice and the strength of Attenborough’s natural presence combine to make his Christie too striking, too difficult to ignore.  Yet the portrait is admirably detailed and thought out – and there’s no histrionic cover to the murder sequences:    Richard Attenborough gives himself fully to these.  John Hurt is wonderful as Timothy Evans.  At first you wonder if he’ll struggle to be believably half-witted but this turns out to be the most brilliant aspect of Hurt’s performance.  He shows you how Evans’ brain works – and what happens when, as frequently happens, he can’t get his thought processes to go any further.  When Tim Evans is baffled he resorts to anger.  What happened to Evans would be a bewildering nightmare for anyone but Hurt makes him profoundly and very individually helpless.   In the witness box at the Old Bailey, Evans hears a question and a vast expanse of silence opens up as he struggles for an answer, and swallows him.  The trial sequences are impressive.   I assume that Exton made use of the actual trial transcript:  this gives the scenes an absorbing reality and Fleischer directs them with remarkable discretion.  Perhaps the staging of the trial is almost too disciplined:  I wondered, for example, if Christmas Humphreys, who prosecuted, wouldn’t have run rings round Evans more quickly and cruelly than he’s shown as doing in the film.  However, the near-underplaying of this part of the trial helps increase the impact of Christie’s outburst of sobbing when the judge dons his black cap.   The rapidity of Evans’ execution and Fleischer’s cut from the hanged man dropping down to Christie stiffly standing up with a wheezing groan of back pain may sound obvious but the sequence has a shocking visceral impact.

    10 Rillington Place is carefully cast and the acting is first rate throughout.  As Tim’s wife Beryl, Judy Geeson occasionally loses concentration but she’s very good once she gets into a conversation (and a rhythm) with Attenborough or Hurt.  She has an especially good bit in a pub, where Tim and Beryl go after a visit to the pictures.  They’re really enjoying themselves until he starts blethering about going to night school and getting qualifications which he knows as well as his wife does are beyond him:  the spell of a happy evening is broken and Judy Geeson registers the return to normality affectingly.  As Ethel Christie, Pat Heywood achieves the near miracle of convincing you that this marriage could have survived for decades – she’s timidly passive, almost stupefied.  (The Christies married in 1920, split up four years later but got back together in the mid-1930s.)  As Ethel prepares to leave 10 Rillington Place to return to live with her sister in Sheffield, ‘Reg’ asks how he’ll manage and where he’s supposed to go, and Ethel says, ‘I know where you should be’.  ‘What do you mean?’ he asks.  ‘You know what I mean,’ Ethel replies.   Pat Heywood manages to make these lines sound both exhausted and chilling.  (This is the couple’s last conversation.   Mrs Christie never made it to Sheffield:  she became her husband’s fifth victim, in December 1952.)  The fine cast also includes:  Isobel Black as Beryl’s friend Alice; Gabrielle Day and Jimmy Gardner as Evans’ aunt and uncle in Merthyr Tydfil;  André Morell as Mr Justice Lewis, Geoffrey Chater as Christmas Humphreys and Robert Hardy as Evans’ defence counsel Malcolm Morris; Ray Barron and Douglas Blackwell as workmen who arrive at 10 Rillington Place at just the wrong moment, from Christie’s point of view, to do repairs for the landlord;  Rudolph Walker as the new West Indian tenant of the property, who discovers the corpses there; and Richard Coleman as the policeman who eventually arrests Christie.

    Richard Fleischer has the reputation of a journeyman Hollywood director.  The reputation is hardly undeserved but he excelled himself on 10 Rillington Place:  he shows a remarkable feel for the time and place of the story and for the nuances of Clive Exton’s truly excellent dialogue, which is both naturalistic and incisive.  In the first part of the film the emphasis on cups of tea raises fears of a very-English-murder treatment of the story.  In fact the picture is all the more impressive for this initial suggestion because of the distance it travels away from it through the story of Timothy Evans.  By the same token, Christie’s prattling on with details of his bogus medical knowledge has a flavour of Francis Iles’s Malice Aforethought (the little man who becomes a killer); but is replaced by something much more pungent when he actually carries out the murders.   The last days of Christie before his arrest are well summarised.  The silence accompanying the closing credits seems like a recognition of how powerful the film has become.  It was shot in the actual Rillington Place in Ladbroke Grove (the street has long since been demolished), although not at number 10.  According to Wikipedia, ‘the three families living there in 1970 refused to move out’ so Fleischer and his team had to make do with number 7.

    26 February 2013

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