12 Years a Slave

Like the whipping scenes we uncomfortably witness, in 12 Years a Slave the sting comes in the tail. The end titles tell us neither the slave pen manager nor Solomon Northup’s kidnappers were punished. Solomon is saved, but that individual justice does not redefine the terrible system. Racism, slavery and savage injustice persist at film’s end. Of course, the point is that even after the Civil War, the freeing of the slaves, the Civil Rights Movement and its legal and societal successes, racism and injustice persist.  Hardly a major daily newspaper passes without a reminder, whether it’s a regressive change in the voters’ rights laws or a Florida bully legally justified in mortally “standing his ground” against the unarmed black kid he hunted. 12 Years a Slave reminds us what contemporary America grew out of and where too much of its roots remain. Slavery, after all, was not limited to the antebellum south. An early shot of the new slaves has the White House righteous in the background.

As Solomon is driven away to his freedom he leaves the slavery a blur behind him. That doesn’t mean it ends. It has embedded its scars on his back and in his mind. When he sees his family, children grown and married, he rues what life he wasted. Slavery remains a campaign he fought until he died -- and even that was in obscurity. The point of British visual artist Steve McQueen’s film is that America has not escaped its racist past. That remains a continuing process. It does not always advance. Electing a black president established not a post-racist America but rather a neo-racist America. Hence Sarah Palin’s coded demand:  “Give us back our America.” That’s why the Republicans just now paralyzed the country in their ostensible attempt to stop Obamacare. Call it Reagancare and they would have fallen all over themselves to register.

McQueen’s film deploys an uncompromising visceral violence that rejects the sentimentality and softened focus of American treatments of that period. It is chilling to see how little control the slaves had in their lives. In that perverse order a black would be punished or even killed if he was found to be literate, not to say uppity. Give him a Harvard degree and there would be screams of outrage and disbelief. There is such violence in the air that steamboat paddles churn up a riot of raucous white water and the boat’s furnaces roar infernal. The Southern swamps have an eerie other-worldliness that sets up the ghosts of slavery past as a still haunting presence. 

Apparently it takes an outsider to cast such an unflinching eye on the subject. To his credit, the physical world and the language seem perfectly realized. No trace of the outsider there, but the work of a director steeped in his subject’s world. Perhaps the only false note is producer Brad Pitt appearing as the Canadian who brings Northup salvation. His performance is fine but he can’t stop registering as Brad Pitt, who gets to make the film’s wisest and most humane and modern speeches. Whether his casting was his or McQueen’s idea, it shivers the film’s verisimilitude and seems self-congratulatory. Pitt's character brings Northup’s story to the North as outside the narrative Pitt helps bring it to the screen.     

But that is a minor cavil about a film that’s courageous, brilliantly written, scored, directed and performed, and as important a statement to America and the world as we have seen this year.