Summertime (and the livin’ ain’t easy)

There are times, watching 12 Years a Slave, where you almost flinch from the screen. The sight of newly enslaved Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) dangling from a rope, barely touching the muddy ground for an uncomfortably long take, draws a visceral reaction from the audience. But then, think how uncomfortable it must have been for the real Solomon Northup.

There’s a long history of corrective cinema, and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is meant to focus your eyes right on the evil — too bad if you don’t like what you see. Steven Spielberg took a similar approach with his hard-to-watch Schindler’s List: the gritty realism of Nazi atrocities was presented as banal, the day-to-day operations of war, and as the corpses of Jewish prisoners piled up, there was the danger that we in the audience would flinch, turn away, or tune out.

McQueen focuses on something in history we think we knew about, and shines a different light on it: Northup was a free man, a black musician born in New York when slavery was still a big industry in the South.

When he was kidnapped and sold onto the slavery market by a cartel (the South always needed more slaves), he at first plotted how to escape; but as McQueen’s episodic tale tells us, this took many years, many attempts, and many slave owners before he could find a way out.

In the movie, Northup is passed on by slave trader Paul Giamatti to plantation master William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch). At first a seemingly kind man, Ford encourages Northup’s intelligence and musical skills on violin. But a run-in with cracker slave boss Paul Dano — who plays squealing inhumanity like no other — leads Ford to sell the troublesome Northup off to an even worse fate: the rakish, sadistic cotton king Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender). Before that, there’s a scene of riveting horror: Northup is left to dangle by the neck for hours, as punishment for causing so much trouble — and as a vivid example to other slaves. His feet struggle to gain purchase on the muddy ground as the daily activities of slave life go on around him.

It’s the kind of scene movie viewers are trained to think will end in some righteous explosion of vengeance — the slave grabbing the whip and lashing back at his tormentors, or blowing them away with a shotgun. But those expecting a Django Unchained moment in 12 Years a Slave are watching the wrong movie. (Let’s face it: with his film, Quentin Tarantino was reimagining Shaft set back in the 1850s. It’s an amusing cartoon, but McQueen’s film is a history lesson.) Ejiofor plays Northup with remarkable humanity and a brittle caginess. He learns to hide his education, his literacy, and his true identity in order to survive plantation life.

He thinks he’s learned a thing or two about evil, until he is sent to the plantation of Master Epps.

Fassbender plays his massah role with an almost messianic zeal, balancing blind cruelty, biblical righteousness and human weakness in a blur of whiskey bottles, bellowing and torn bodices. He’s an interesting, contradictory creation, somewhat like Ralph Fiennes’ turn as Nazi camp commandant Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List — though without the moment of redemption. The fact that his strings are partially pulled by his insanely jealous wife Mary (Sarah Paulson) just adds to the levels of human degradation. Watch him curse his slaves for ruining his cotton crop by infesting it with boll weevils, blaming God’s blight on their “inferior nature.” It might be Fassbender’s most well-turned role yet.

But the one who brought home the Oscar was Lupita Nyong’o as Patsey, the long-suffering slave mistress of Epps who wishes for nothing else but to drown peacefully in the nearby stream and end her life in hell. As we watch the succession of welts and bruises mark her body, deface her beauty and drive her to the edge of insanity, you realize what a fearless performance this is. The final scene — an argument over a bar of soap — leads to the single most blood-chilling moment of cruelty in recent cinema.

The only fly in the ointment, performance-wise, is Brad Pitt, who, as executive producer, perhaps couldn’t resist putting his personal imprint on a project close to his heart. Unfortunately, his stilted cameo — as a Canadian abolitionist — pulls you right out of an otherwise seamless narrative. It reminds you, in a bad way, of Tarantino’s similar mugging in Django.

There’s frustration, too, in watching Northup suffer indignity after indignity, failed attempt after failed attempt, year after year. Despite the movie poster showing Ejiofor running across the screen, racing to freedom, his character instead does a lot of waiting, and abiding. Not much running.

It’s interesting that Northup’s book was a minor bestseller when it first came out in 1852, selling 30,000 copies, though this was quickly overshadowed by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin a year later. And who does one imagine bought all those books? Northern white liberals, mostly. Certainly not Southern plantation owners.

Director McQueen, whose movie won the Best Picture Oscar while he was passed over as Best Director, had a few words to say at the ceremonies about the 30 million slaves still out there in the world, presumably sold into human trafficking channels. It was one of those Oscar moments that was meant to make you think of how a movie can draw attention to the wider issues facing the world. But the images most people took away from the Oscars were of celebrity group selfies and pizza parties. (Nyong’o’s Oscar speech did get a lot of shares, of course.) But within minutes of the Oscars, there were posts showing a picture of Brad and Angelina gazing raptly at Nyong’o, with some wag tweeting, “They SO want to adopt her.” McQueen’s movie may be a powerful glimpse at a piece of almost-forgotten history, but not even shining a light on human misery can match the ADHD of modern movie consumers and their thirst for posting.