Last year, the exciting, expertly-crafted spy thriller Argo walked away with the Academy Award for Best Picture. While personally I liked that movie a lot and said so in my review of the film, it still had distinct and conspicuous "Hollywood" touches such as a contrived climactic chase and a wild-eyed villain.
It is, perhaps a fitting change of pace that this year the Oscar for Best Picture went to a film that was decidedly different in tone, Steve McQueen's heart-wrenching drama. 12 Years a Slave.
The film depicts the harrowing experience of Solomon Northup (played here by Chiwetel Ejiofor) a violin player living in New York City in 1841 with his beautiful wife and two children, who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. Northup, the film takes pains to emphasize, was born an raised a free man, so when he is kidnapped and sold into slavery the shock goes well beyond the physical pain he endures when he is beaten and whipped to admit that he is a slave. While in transit on a boat that will take him from Washington to his new life as a slave, he learns a thing or two about how to survive from Clemens Ray, a fellow slave who tells him to keep his head down. Northup, renamed Platt, is first sold to William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch) a relatively benevolent, if ultimately impotent master. However, when Northup runs afoul of a cruel overseer (an irritating Paul Dano) Ford is forced to let him go, and as payment for a debt he cedes Northup to Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender) a cotton plantation owner who is not only malevolent but who may actually be insane as well, given that apart from working his slaves to the bone, he actually wakes them up in the dead of the night to dance like puppets in his dining room. Epps requires that his slaves pick at least two hundred pounds of cotton a day or they suffer beatings. The most productive worker on Epps plantation is the gangly Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o, who won an Oscar for her performance), who picks an average of five hundred pounds of cotton daily, over twice what anyone else picks, and she happens to be the apple of Epps' eye, much to the irritation of his wife (Sarah Paulson), who is exceedingly cruel to the poor Patsey. Throughout his ordeal, Solomon never loses hope that he may again one day be a free man, though that hope seems exceedingly elusive as the years drag on.
Of all the films I saw that were released in 2013, this one made me the most uncomfortable, and in that respect I think it was completely successful at what it set out to do. I wouldn't be surprised if, like any Hollywood story, liberties were taken with Northup's experience, but the utter desolation of a man taken away from a comfortable life and made to live like an animal for over a decade is captured with painful perfection by director McQueen and his star Ejiofor, who constantly wears the expression on his face that says he knows deep in his heart that he doesn't belong where he is. It's hard for me to appreciate details like the craft that went into the filmmaking when all I could feel throughout the movie was my stomach churning at the stark human cruelty, and in that sense I think this was McQueen's ultimate achievement; he put me in that moment.
For me, though, no matter how uncomfortable and difficult the movie as to watch, I could not help but appreciate screenwriter John Ridley's adaptation of the book on which the movie was based. I was mesmerized by the wonderfully civilized English employed and enjoyed it in much the same way I savored the late 19th century English spoken by the characters in the Coen brother's 2010 take on the novel True Grit, or the early 19th century English spoken by the characters in Ang Lee's adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. People don't talk like that anymore, I realized, and it may not always be the most practical way to speak, but to me there was something truly elegant about the way English was spoken back then. Perhaps the success of this movie could go some way towards helping restore such wonderful nuance to the English language.
Given the brutal subject matter and the fact that, even on a good day, movies about black people are never particularly popular here in the Philippines unless that black person happens to be Will Smith, Wesley Snipes or some other comedy or action superstar, this movie will probably be gone from our theaters sooner than most films, but to my mind it is one that is relevant to our experience, not just historically but even now.
The evil of human trafficking, after all, is far from merely a thing of the past, and Filipinos are among the most egregiously victimized, especially given the high rate of poverty in our country. Watching the movie, I recalled the short video that accompanied the Philippine national anthem that played before the movie began which depicted, among other things, Filipinos working overseas, and there and then I saw the unintended parallels. Northup was lured to his fate by the promise of work and a fairly handsome compensation, if only for a brief moment, only for things to go horribly awry. Even today, Filipinos leave their country on a regular basis in search of better opportunities abroad, only to arrive at their destination and find that what they actually end up doing is far from what they expected; skilled workers end up doing manual labor and entertainers end up as prostitutes, for example. Northup was enticed by an opportunity for some extra money, while today's overseas workers act out of desperation, and even with the phalanx of domestic and international laws enacted to protect them, end up working in sub-human conditions. Northup was tricked and ultimately victimized by evil men, while overseas workers are victimized by evil men taking advantage of their poverty, a systemic evil with deep roots.
The film reminds audiences that once upon a time, it was legal to own human beings and to treat them like chattel, and that it was only through the efforts of decent and upright people that such practices were ultimately outlawed. One hopes that the collective efforts of similarly principled people can one day work to free all of humanity from the poverty that enslaves them as well.
5/5
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