12 Years a Slave (2013)

Steve McQueen has quite a reputation as a director and I was curious about how he would approach the corrupt history of the USA. It turns out 12 Years a Slave is well worth watching, but it is too much of a conventional story about one man's fight for liberation; the film leans on a kind of narrative progression that makes the whole thing a non-risky business. Hans Zimmer has re-used some of his old pompous scores and McQueen opts for the dramatic focus characteristic of mainstream Hollywood. The merit of the film is that it shows how slavery was upheld by very different people, well-meaning cowards, economic opportunists and deluded sadists. Sadly, it is the sadism McQueen lays most of the emphasis on, and for that reason, 12 Years a Slave may still be seen as a flawed attempt to re-open a discussion about slavery, as a system, not only as a form of personal corruption.

The story is interesting and captivating, of course. A musician is hired by a pair of showmen. He is drugged and then he finds himself kidnapped on a slave ship. His reaction spells horror and exasperation; he has rights! But he is taken to a place where he has no rights, no voice. We see slavery through his eyes, the eyes of a person to whom this is an alien system, an alien form of life. The film points out how different his position is from the people who were born into slavery, and what this means for rebellion. The film follows the man, Northup, as he tries to deal with his situation, to survive, to break free. The film elicits our identification with the man: his suffering and his bewilderment is ours, we see with his eyes. Maybe its this way of taking on the subject that makes the film so conventional. The problem with identification of a specific sort that I think this film can be charged with is that one gets lost in one's own reactions, one has no time to linger on anything; one worries about what will happen next, so to speak. In watching Northup suffer, I feel the whip, I wince, but too often I don't see the man and his circumstances (one of the few scenes that contains another sort of intensity shows Northup at a funeral, and we see him join the other slaves in song). McQueen evokes - he rarely shows, he rarely makes me attend to what I see, he rarely makes me pay close attention. But I'm not sure whether that's a fair description. 12 years a slave works with close-ups; these close-ups evoke emotions, but the setting of these close-ups is perhaps too comfortable, too "cinematic" as graphic violence watched very closely is paired with panoramic images of natures. It is somehow as if McQueen wants to allow his viewers moments of respite so as to be able to stomach the next physical scene. 12 Years a Slave is a powerful film, and McQueen is a director who knows how to work with images that shake the viewer.

12 Years a Slave probes into an immensely important topic and it places powerlessness at the heart of the story. But my complaint would be that despite McQueen's sensitivity for the different types of slave-owners and the different background of the slaves, he fails to pay sufficient attention to the milieu of slavery: I would have liked to see a film that digs deeper into the self-understanding of these slave-owners, or the relations among the slaves. The moments of melodrama and Hollywood-style Big Speeches (some of which are delivered by populist-acting Brad Pitt) that the film contains underlines this flaw. There are very few scenes in which we get a sense of everyday life for the slaves, and their masters; McQueen is too busy crafting scenes with a striking message. 12 Years a Slave showcases many insightful moments of outrage, but as a whole, the film does not quite achieve what it tries to do: in my view, it is compromised by the desire to tell a specific type of Story, and to deliver a specific type of Message - perhaps the film is a bit too conscious of its own singularity in American movie history? Rather than compassion and inquiry, 12 Years a Slave remains at the level of meticulous composition and well-meaning gesture.