It is difficult to think of who Steve McQueen would be as a director if he didn’t have Michael Fassbender right there along with him. This is not to say McQueen needs Fassbender, or that the director wouldn’t be an accomplished filmmaker without him; I have no doubt he would be. But Fassbender has been so central to the success of McQueen’s films Hunger (2008), Shame (2011), and now 12 Years a Slave, that trajectory of the emergence of both stars are intertwined. 12 Years a Slave may be their best collaboration to date, a film that is as multifaceted as it is difficult to watch. A stripped-bare look at slavery, a woefully under-explored history, told as a nightmarish, Kafkaesque ordeal of a free black man from New York who is kidnapped and sold into slavery.
Fassbinder plays a supporting role for the first time in a McQueen film, but it is an all-important one. He is a slave owner, a vicious, hypocritical, cold, menacing, terrible villain, as frightening a character we’ve seen on screen since Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. And it is Fassbinder’s performance, reminiscent of fellow Irishman Daniel Day Lewis, that keeps evil vivid in a way that isn’t overwrought or turned into caricature. This is a difficult with films about slavery, and one of the reasons why there have not been many good ones made. The darkness of the subject is nearly unfathomable to contemporary sensibilities. This was not that long ago, these inclinations have not completed un-rooted themselves from the American character, and yet it is all so unspeakably horrible that we either don’t speak about it or treat it as a nightmarish dream, as Tarantino did with last year’s Django Unchained.
12 Years a Slave is a historical drama, and it opens amidst a sense of serene domesticity. Ejiofor’s Solomon Northrup is a musician, and after playing for a small party in his hometown of Saratoga, NY, he returns to his home and tucks his children into bed. His wife and children are heading out on a three week journey the next day, and it is by a stroke of coincidence that walking through the park after their departure, he is solicited by two men to travel to Washington D.C. and play in a troupe of musicians and acrobats they have put together. With the family away, Solomon obliges, only to be lavished with money and booze, before being sold to kidnappers taking advantage of laws in Washington which don’t sufficiently protect freemen from poachers. In one of McQueen’s most scathing shots, we see Solomon yelling for help through the bars of a dank, red brick jail cell, and the camera pans upwards to reveal the U.S. Capital building in the distance, white, cold, aloof, and useless.
There are political subtexts to 12 Years a Slave, though, to the filmmaker’s credit, there are no attempts to turn this story into a simple allegorical commentary. He doesn’t have to. The movie roots itself in deeper, more enduring thematic trends, questions of justice and freedom, suffering and identity. It is enough to know that this is a true story, based on a memoir penned by the actual Solomon Northrup, who was kidnapped, sold into slavery. And it is his transformation while in captivity that comprises 12 Years a Slave’s sublime dramatic effect.
Ejiofor’s magnificent in the role, outdoing Fassbinder if only because his role is more multi-faceted and requires a more subtle rendering of soul in turmoil. The dramatic arc of the movie involves the slow breaking down of Solomon’s dignity, which receives its first blow when he is renamed “Plat” on the auction block. Just before he is sold to the first time, Solomon is in the hull of a ship headed to Georgia with two other kidnapped or escaped slaves. Solomon suggests a mutiny. They have the manpower to overtake the small crew. But in a chilling moment, one of the other men dismisses the idea, saying that the other slaves on the ship are two beaten by life-long slavery to even understand how to take up arms against their masters. There’s a dichotomy created between the black men who understand themselves as free, who retain their dignity, and the slaves, who Solomon, at first, sees himself as somehow apart from.
This is one of the dramatic strands that complicates 12 Years a Slave’s moral world. It is not enough to see this film as a simple retelling of a affliction enacted by bad guys on good guys. Rather, the story of the film is that of Solomon’s slow loss of dignity which breeds an empathy and full understanding of the vast ignominy of slavery. At first he is short tempered with a woman whose children have been sold away from her and who can’t stop crying for her grief. In this first plantation, Solomon sees the goodness in his master, even if he keeps slaves, and there is something like hope in the fact that the owner retains a sense of humanity in spite of his moral crimes.
But it is when Solomon is eventually sold to Fassbender’s Edwin Epps that forges the full transformation of his character. There he witnesses Epps’ perverse infatuation with a beautiful young slave girl, Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), and the evil of the institution is full-fleshed. There are some brutal scenes, such as a whipping of Patsey that is graphic, violent, and difficult to watch. But simpler moments, like the scene of a funeral for a man who drops dead in the cotton field, are almost more revealing. The women begin to sing spirituals, and Solomon stands purse-lipped. When he finally begins to mouth along the words of the song you can see in his eyes the realization that he no longer understands himself as a freeman, and that the other kidnapped slave on the ship was wrong: there is no distinction between these men and women. It’s an effect McQueen repeats, long steady close-up shots of Solomon framed in a low-depth of focus panoramic frame, which flattens the face of the man against the blur of the world as existence becomes increasingly incomprehensible and difficult to bear. These moments are arresting and effective.
In ways like this, McQueen’s film manages to create a raw, emotional power that is both rooted in a real, historical subjugation and transcendes the specificity of its setting through its dramatic intensity. As with Hunger and Shame, 12 Years a Slave is a film that explores the nature of human dignity that is revealed by suffering. It is an exacerbating journey to get there, and one that begs the question, why this movie, and why now? The simple answer is that we have insufficiently explored the history and legacy of slavery in America in cinema. But the broader, and more unsettling implication of the necessity of this film is bound up in the essential humanity that is on display in it, from the quiet, beaten dignity of Ejiofor’s Solomon and Nyong’o’s Patsey, to the cruel manipulations of Fassbender’s Epps. 12 Years a Slave roots the history of slavery in the ordeals and manipulations of these characters, and by doing so it reveals the wickedness of the institution of slavery in a much more familiar inclination: a simple, dismissive disposition towards fellow man, to see someone else as somehow other.
