New Release Review: '12 Years a Slave'

The year is 1841. Two slaves heave a body overboard, leaving it to the sea. As the first looks on in despair the second tells him 'He's better off than we are'. Over the next 134-minutes 12 Years a Slave will go about proving that.

Based on the memoir of the same name, 12 Years a Slave tells the story of Solomon Northup: a black man, born free, but kidnapped and sold as a slave under false pretences. Solomon is given a new name, one he'll answer to or be beaten to within an inch of his life; after all, it's hard to sell a man if he keeps insisting he's free, and has a name which leads to proof of that fact. He's then shipped off and sold. That we know he'll eventually attain his freedom does little (by which I mean it does nothing) to soften the blow of what's to come.

It seems strange that motion picture (of one kind or another) has been around for 136 years but this is the first feature film to put slavery front and centre, and deal with it frankly. Others have dabbled with it, but it's been a subplot. We'd see its repercussions but get little more than glimpses of the thing itself. Director Steve McQueen conjures some startlingly effective imagery by not only putting slavery at the centre of the film but by making it commonplace. McQueen foregrounds the horror, then allows life to go on in the background as if nothing's wrong. The whippings are just another sound mixed in with the rustling of the corn stalks and the shifting of the trees.

I'm struggling to avoid using the word 'faultless' to describe the film. It's dangerous to say something's perfect - it's too easy to begin dismantling the assertion - but 12 Years a Slave, for me, was just that. The cinematography was reminiscent of Terrence Malick's nature-inflected lensing, but more grounded, more believable; the score by Hans Zimmer is surprisingly subtle, and is only noticeably Zimmer-y during Solomon's brief tenure on the ship that takes him to his new life - the oppressive doom-laden music that accompanies this sequence is a little on the nose, but it's very effective; and then there's the performances: Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon, Benedict Cumberbatch (Solomon's first master), Michael Fassbender (his second), Lupita Nyong'o (as a slave caught between Fassbender's lust and his wife's loathing), Paul Dano (once again playing a creep, and doing it well, but maybe he should branch out now that's he's mastered it?) and many others, completely disappear into their roles. Of them all Ejiofor has the hardest task: it's a quiet un-showy part that requires him to shrink inside himself. His back slowly curves and his voice deadens as he tries to fade into the background, to go unnoticed, to survive.

The film strikes only one off note: Brad Pitt as an open minded Canadian. Not that you'd know he's Canadian, as Pitt employs the same overly ripe Tennessee accent he used in Inglorious Basterds. There's something about Pitt that feels anachronistic. He doesn't belong. He can be a capable actor, and fits into the same period setting just fine when he's called upon to be otherworldy (Interview with a Vampire), but here that works rather less well.

12 Years... won't be for everyone. Solomon is a passive character. He has to be to survive. But for some that might make the film too much like a catalogue of facts - albeit beautifully and starkly rendered ones. If you can get lost in Solomon's journey the film is utterly immersive, brutalising, and eye-opening.

Overall: 10/10