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
