12 YEARS A SLAVE Is Exploitation Masquerading As High Art

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12 Years a Slave – **

Director Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is a horrifying motion picture in two ways. First, it lays bare the brutality of slavery in a way rarely, if ever, seen on film. It’s graphic, often disturbingly so, but that leads right into number two.

The experience of watching 12 Years a Slave is uneven, falling somewhere between seeing a torture porn horror flick and a classic historical melodrama. It’s like a combination Django Unchained and The Passion of the Christ without all the fun. That makes it hard to take seriously.

And 12 Years a Slave is a serious motion picture to a fault. In its attempt to be the Schindler’s List of American slavery, the film overreaches, developing what can only be called a sadomasochistic relationship with the audience. (This isn’t the first time McQueen has done this either, but more on that later.) The worst part is, it didn’t have to.

It doesn’t take long to get to the horror of it all. After opening up in on Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) working on a sugar plantation we flashback to his time as a free man in Saratoga Springs, New York. He has a wife and two children, a seemingly idyllic middle class life and a job as a violinist. But when he goes on tour with two “circus performers” to Washington, he ends up in shackles.

The film quickly become a horror movie from there, with lashings and slayings. When we enter the ship heading to New Orleans for the slave market, the terror of it all is beaten into us by a score that sounds like the theme to American Horror Story rather than a historical drama.

Upon landing in New Orleans, Northup is renamed Platt by the slave traders and sold to a sympathetic, and at times guilt-ridden, slaver named Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch). Ford turns out to be the most despicable character in the film, a classic upper middle class white liberal who like to think he’s doing good by feeling bad while still having slaves tend to his every need. He takes a liking to Northup, but realizes having a talented, educated black man (obviously a freeman) as a slave is more trouble than it’s worth, eventually shipping him to a master who can break Northup in.

This master is Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender). He’s a brutal drunkard who happens to own a cotton plantation. And among the things he does to his slaves is rape, severe lashings, and forcing them to dance for his amusement late at night. It’s Epps who demonstrates to Northup and to the audience just how brutal slavery was through a series of incidents, each more disturbing than the last.

The worst of them all is the horrific lashing of a slave woman named Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o). This is where we actually get to see the whip cut through flesh to the bone. Patsey is Epps prized possession, he’s even possibly in love with her. But his jealousy and his wife’s displeasure make her the most abused slave of the bunch. At one point in the film, she even asks Northup to drown her. But this is only for our benefit, as we continue to see the horrors of slavery through Northup’s eyes.

12 Years a Slave ends with the reunion of Northup and his family. It’s a beautiful moment, one that will bring many audience members to tears, as it did me. But my guess is that the brutality that precedes this moment isn’t what really causes the waterfalls. No, it’s much simpler. It’s Ejiofor’s performance.

Ejiofor doesn’t need the film’s graphic moments to make the Solomon Northup’s story work. And in fact, at many times McQueen’s insistence that we see the brutality, whether it’s a lynching or a whipping, undercuts the Ejiofor’s excellent performance and the film’s tremendous drama.

But that’s McQueen for you. Like in Shame, he’s more concerned with us experiencing his characters suffering than immersing in their story. And his focus on this pain only makes his movies feel like high-end exploitation films.

Consider that last year, Quentin Tarantino actually made a great drama about slavery live within a B-movie. The moment when dogs rip apart a slave in Django Unchained, mostly out of the audience’s sight, is more powerful than anything we see in 12 Years a Slave. That’s using the art form to its fullest extent. There’s nothing like that here.

McQueen, with 12 Years a Slave, once again shows that he has more in common with Michael Bay than he does the world’s elite filmmakers. Just as Michael Bay is an arthouse filmmaker waiting to break out of his blockbuster shell (how else could you explain Transformers 2), McQueen is an exploitation filmmaker who can’t stop making melodramas. And after seeing three of his films now, I’m confident in saying he’s much more qualified to remake Cannibal Holocaust than he is 12 Years a Slave.

That’s not to say 12 Years a Slave is a bad movie; it’s probably McQueen’s best work. But with more creative filmmaking, we could have been spared much the violence and the film would have had a greater impact. As it stands, the film feels like it’s only goal is to make you understand, really understand, just how brutal slavery, as if we needed the reminder. It’s like making a Holocaust movie where we’re visually bombarded with Nazi horrors—from gas chambers to concentration camp rapes to human experimentation—just in case we didn’t realize how bad genocide could be.

So if you’re interested in suffering through a movie rather than experiencing a story, by all means see 12 Years a Slave. You’ll probably feel terrible after seeing it, but at least you’ll start to feel better knowing that all that is behind us, right?

12 Years a Slave— directed by Steve McQueen, written by John Ridley and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, and Lupita Nyong’o—is now in theaters.