Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave goes directly to the heart of American slavery without any shilly-shallying — unlike The Butler, say, or even Django Unchained — and is what I call a ‘Brace Yourself’ film, as you must brace yourself for horror after horror, injustice after injustice, shackles, muzzles, whippings, rapes, hangings. You will be harrowed to within an inch of your life, as perhaps is only right, given the subject matter, but you will not wish to flee your seat. You will recoil. You will flinch. You will say to yourself, ‘Oh no, not again.’ But the story will seize you with such a visceral power you will be rooted to the spot. I know I was and I’m not easy to root. Mind everywhere, usually.
This is not like McQueen’s previous two features — Hunger, about Bobby Sands’s hunger strike in prison, and Shame, about one man’s crippling sex addiction — which came entirely from the left field. This is far more conventional, and conventionally told, with a beginning, a middle, and the end, which you will long for, not because you are bored (I wasn’t) but because you so want it to turn out OK, and for Solomon Northup to come out into the light.
It is based on Solomon’s astonishing true story, written as a memoir in 1853, and opens with him living as a free man in Saratoga Springs, New York. Played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, he is a fiddle player and appears prosperous. He has a wife he loves, two children he loves. They all live in a nice house, and the family are treated with respect and affection by the local white community. It is such a happy, elegant life you just know something is going to come along and ruin it — brace position, now! — and it does when two men lure Solomon to Washington, for what he thinks will be a lucrative short stint playing fiddle for the circus, but where he is plied with drink, and drugged, and next wakes up stripped, imprisoned, shackled, Django Re-Chained.
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