12 Years a Slave is not your typical Hollywood period piece about slavery, and that should be no surprise. The director is not a creature of the Hollywood establishment, but Steve McQueen, a British director of color.
The British have a better sense of history than we Yanks, and perhaps a less cartoonish view of history. It could because we are a much younger country that the UK. But I believe it has to do with a body politic that is more decidedly low information compared to our British cousins.
Too many films by American directors would show us the world of slavery through modern eyes. This puts us into a time machine, and brings us back to witness that world that was.
The film is based on the account of Solomon Northup, a free black man, born in Rhode Island, who later moved to Saratoga Springs, NY, where he became a musician, and supplemented down periods between gigs with various carpentry and construction jobs. He meets two men who under the guise of offering him some well paid work, drug him, kidnap him, and sell him as a supposed runaway slave. Northup had planned to stop at his home to get his documentation before traveling with these two men, precisely because he knew the danger he could be in if he couldn’t prove that he was free. But before that could happen, these men snatched him. He was to live the hell of slavery for 12 years, until he would eventually get word to outsiders so he could be rescued. I don’t want too give to many details about the plot. I’ll recommend this film highly, but I caution that the brutality is difficult to watch.
I was at first taken aback by what seemed to be a stilted, wooden manner of speech of some of the characters. But I realized, from my past readings of first person accounts of the time period, is that this is how educated people of that day spoke. On realizing this, I was no longer watching this in a movie house, but transported back to 1841 and witnessing history.
When Northup wakes up shackled and learns he is being returned to the South as an alleged runaway slave, he does what anyone would expect him to do. He protests that he is a free man. After being whipped into submission to terrorize him into not revealing the truth, he seems to accept his fate. This is hard to watch, for me, a man of the twenty first century. Through my modern eyes, the logical thing would have been to keep telling people that he is a free man, and they have no right to do this to him, and eventually someone would listen. But Northup knew better, because he was a black man of the 1840s United States. Yes, he was born a free man, and had never known slavery, but also knew what little weight the word of black man had, even a free one. He was also quite familiar with the stories of free blacks of all ages being kidnapped to be sold in the South, the very reason he planned to first go home and pick up his papers. Accepting his fate for as long as necessary was not defeatist, but his only hope of surviving.
Too many movies depict the slave plantations as being run by crazy, evil, psychopaths. This film, however, shows quite ordinary people taking part in a tremendous evil that is life as normal. To be sure, a psychopath could well find a place in the hierarchy of a plantation, particularly as an overseer. But what made such a vile system function was that ordinary people accepted an evil system as the true normality.
His first owner, a man named William Ford, comes across as a decent person within an indecent system, and is at times, is quite respectful to the slaves. Nonetheless, Ford is still a cog in the slave system doing his bit to keep it running. Although he protects Northup from being killed by a brutal overseer, he nonetheless is willing to sell him to another owner, even though he has found out that Northup has been illegally enslaved. Northup went through a few more owners, each one seemingly worse than the previous owners. He accepts his fate, not because he has given up, but he must to survive against all hope until the day he might get his chance for freedom.
I won’t say any more. Just go see the movie.