There is a shot late in director Steve McQueen’s bracing period epic 12 Years a Slave that epitomizes the peculiar lyricism that the British auteur often discovers in otherwise banal moments. At this juncture in the film, former black freeman Solomon Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) has been enchained for over a decade in antebellum Louisiana, and has recently put his life and prospective freedom in the hands of another man. McQueen inserts into the narrative a quiet, twilit close-up of Northrup as he gazes into the distance. There is no proximate context for the shot, but as it lingers, Ejiofor’s shifting features convey a flock of emotions: anticipation, despair, regret, terror, and a quivering but indomitable resolve. With his countenance alone, the actor voices the unseen intertitle: Time Passes. It’s a forceful shot, all the more remarkable when one realizes that it consists of little but a man looking at something.
Such is the cinematic dexterity of the multi-talented McQueen, who transitioned from video installations and shorts to feature films with the one-two punch of Hunger (2008) and Shame (2011). Both of those films present harrowing, aesthetically vigorous depictions of self-mortification—regarding the 1981 Irish republican hunger strike in the former case, and a sex addict’s frenzied dissolution in the latter. 12 Years, by contrast, pointedly concerns itself with inhumanity that is directed towards others. The memoir of the same name was dictated by the real Northrup, a free New York black man who was kidnapped in 1841 and enslaved in the hell of the Southern plantation economy. Previous adapted as a 1984 PBS television film, the new version of 12 Years is that all-too-rare period drama in which a black American is the unequivocal protagonist.
Penned by screenwriter and producer John Ridley, 12 Years employs Northrup’s distinctive experiences as a free Northerner in bondage to provide a horrific, ground-level glimpse of American slavery. As with innumerable historical dramas, the film’s first-order aims are at least somewhat didactic, in that 12 Years attempts to recreate the world of the Southern plantation with scholarly fidelity. Compared to McQueen’s previous features, his latest work is remarkably straightforward, concerning itself less with atmospherics and moral musings than with the stark drama of a man encountering fresh grotesqueries at every turn while struggling to stay alive and sane.
Despite the viciousness and unsettling surrealism it portrays, the film can at times feel like a box-checking expedition into the archetypes of the antebellum South. Benedict Cumberbatch appears as a “decent” planter akin to Augustine St. Clare, Michael Fassbender as a sadistic and loathsome slave owner in the mold of Simon Legree, and Alfre Woodard as a house slave who relishes the privileges afforded by her master’s sexual attentions. What perpetually grounds 12 Years is the knowledge the Northrup’s travails were real, if atypical in their eventual conclusion. Also crucial is the vividness with which McQueen and his performers sketch the details of plantation society, from the garish to the subtle. In one scene, a white mistress (Sarah Paulson) uses her slaves as pawns in petty acts of defiance against her abusive, adulterous husband. Meanwhile, the film maintains a rigorous adherence to Northrup’s viewpoint.
At the center of 12 Years’ success is McQueen’s pure skill as a film storyteller: his enviable aptitude for anamorphic widescreen composition, his confident usage of flashbacks and flash-forwards, and the aforementioned poeticism he conjures from minutiae and silences. Just as vital, however, is the presence of Ejiofor, whose portrayal strikes a fine balance between Everyman relatability and blunt specificity. As Northrup, he creates a man who is elemental in his yearnings—freedom, family, and modest middle-class respectability—but also self-evidently pummeled in flesh and spirit by the nightmarish realities of captivity.
