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#Post#: 319--------------------------------------------------
12 YEARS A SLAVE (2013)
By: agate Date: May 18, 2014, 4:21 pm
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I have been hoping for years to read the book, Twelve Years a
Slave by Solomon Northup, a free black man who was kidnapped and
kept as a slave in the south for 12 years. I haven’t yet read it
but at least there’s this movie of it now.
The real Solomon Northup is said to have written a play based on
his book–the account of his kidnapping into slavery in 1841 and
the ensuing dozen years he spent as a slave. I don’t know if the
movie is based on his play or on his book.
But it is long past time that this story was told, giving the
viewing audience slavery as it was, the antebellum South as it
was. Maybe the US viewing audience has finally grown weary of
Gone with the Wind and other films perpetuating the Southern
mythology that has comforted and lulled the white race into
thinking it was all just a misty dream filled with mint juleps
and Spanish moss and dashing Confederate soldiers, with many a
white southern child being named after Robert E. Lee for
generations.
12 Years a Slave gives us the Spanish moss and a few views of
the elegant dancing going on in the big house but the rest of
the time we’re looking at the world as the slaves must have
known it.
That this world was real and not so long ago became obvious to
me as a child when Southern African-Americans were bent over
cotton in the fields, struggling to eke out a living so they
could inhabit the weather-beaten tiny houses that dotted the
southern landscape, not so very different from the
weather-beaten structures seen in this movie, set in 1841-1853.
By the 1940s, when I was in the south, there were also
weather-beaten churches and schools, but some of the structures
had no electricity, and many had no indoor plumbing.
African-Americans couldn’t drink at white drinking fountains or
use the main entrances in any building. If they went to a white
person’s house, it was understood that they would turn up at the
back door, never at the front, because “of course” they were
there only because they were reporting for work there or
applying for work.
Not so far from slavery when you think about it. A hundred
years later.
From what little I know about slave conditions in the south at
the time, I’d say that this movie probably has it right. The
cruelty of slave-owners and the very bare subsistence level at
which the slaves lived are what has gone largely unmentioned in
history books, novels, and movies. This movie focuses on these
conditions, and it is an excruciatingly painful film to watch.
This is not a movie that is exploiting a story for its shock
value. There are many scenes of chilling brutality, but my guess
is that these are in the book as well, and that Solomon Northup
was not making them up. There is too much evidence from other
stories like his.
Chiwetel Ejiofor’s performance as Solomon Northup is stunning,
and all of the acting seems at least adequate though the overly
formal language makes the dialogue seem as if lines are being
awkwardly read at times.
I wonder why the ending failed to mention what became of Patsey,
though–a particularly cruelly abused, very young slave who was
hoping for help from Solomon all along, and whom Solomon
promised to see again soon. But she’s never mentioned again.
Bravo for this movie.
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