Slave Narrative: 12 YEARS A SLAVE

Solomon Northup was a talented violinist who was hired to play for parties and other social gatherings near his home. He lived in upstate New York with his wife and three children. Because he was born in 1808 and was black, it is important to note that he was a free man. But that would not always be the case. British director Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, based on Northup’s memoir of the same name, tells the story of how, in 1841, this free man was kidnapped, taken to the South, and sold into slavery. It is not a film about slavery, but about a slave. In the process it becomes a catalogue of injustices that can only hint at the depths of depravity the American slave trade contained. Told wholly from a black perspective, the film belongs to a rich history of slave narratives, a harrowing literary genre that has rarely made the leap to the movie screen so intact. Too often softened and glamorized by interjecting noble white presence into the core of the narrative arc, this film finds at its center simply, powerfully, Mr. Northup. The kidnapping is only an extra layer of injustice, to most fully embody the tragedy of slavery and make thoroughly real how dehumanizing an institution it is.

Slavery is something that many Americans understand historically and academically, but here is a film that says look, feel the pain, understand. This is a film of unrelenting brutality. Though I sat through the whole film, I must admit to averting my eyes at the worst of the violence. A scene late in the film lingers on flesh torn from a slave woman’s back as the plantation’s master whips her. The bloody ripping and slicing is a monstrously effective visual that’s uncomfortable and upsetting. It feels honest, not exploitative of real world violence nor mean-spirited towards the audience. It’s simply presented, raw and exposed. It at times recalls Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ with its commitment to showing battered bodies, torn flesh, and logging blows of whips and cudgels. The sound design blasts these strikes out of the speakers loudly, rattling the audience’s eardrums with their force and violence. When Northup is first captured, he pleads for his freedom, citing his free man status. “Show us your papers,” the kidnappers snarl. When Northup cannot – nor could he move his manacled hands even if he had papers – his back is bludgeoned in one long take, each smack one of terrifying force, physically and aurally.

Viewed in conjunction with McQueen’s other films, the prison hunger strike procedural Hunger and sex addiction drama Shame, it’s clear he’s a director interested in the human body in relationship to the human soul and the limits past which both can be pushed. In 12 Years a Slave, the sins of the country’s moral negotiations are raked across the bodies of the enslaved, while others go about their business, aware, but unable or unwilling to help. In a harrowing moment of sustained painful suspense, McQueen’s camera watches for an agonizingly long period of time as a slave hangs from a noose on a low branch, saved only by standing and shifting on his tiptoes slipping in mud. On all sides, those who live on the plantation – black and white alike – continue their routines, eyes averted. In the distance, we can hear the sound of children playing.

There are no dates placed on screen to mark the passage of time. The title plainly states the narrative’s duration. We know that Solomon Northup will remain enslaved for 12 long, painful years, but we’re as lost in the accumulation of incident as he is. Time is a blur of terrors and anxiety that slowly gives way to reluctant resignation. He is trying to survive. At the center of the film is a monumental performance from Chiwetel Ejiofor, long a welcome screen presence in films as diverse as Inside Man, Love Actually, and Children of Men. Here, Ejiofor shows remarkable restraint, never overplaying the emotional journey, trusting the facts of the narrative and subtle shifts in his behavior and expression to sell the depths of horror Northup saw and the resilience Northup displayed. John Ridley’s script follows him from a slave market overseen by Paul Giamatti to several different plantations owned by the likes of Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Fassbender, Sarah Paulson, and Bryan Batt. Though there are some differences between them – some moderately kinder, others ruthlessly cruel – they all are doing their part to perpetuate poisonous beliefs and uphold a horrendous institution.

Though the film is pitched at a relentlessly grim and miserable abusive level, one can never feel prepared for the cruelty to come. McQueen’s use of carefully composed, sleek cinematography and studied framing (with his usual cinematographer Sean Bobbitt) doesn’t get in the way of the impact. When a plantation owner’s wife suddenly hurls a glass at a slave woman’s head, object making contact with skull with a sickening crack, it is startling. This is a world where that doesn’t seem out of the ordinary. And that’s what horrifying. The writing for and acting of the ensemble has a sense of overwhelming specificity. The film never stoops to viewing either blacks or whites homogenously. Much like the owners have their differences, we see here slaves who become favored (Alfre Woodard), who agitate for rebellion (Michael K. Williams), and who are singled out for specific abuses (Lupita Nyong’o). There’s a variety here in a film that finds much diversity in corners of history that too easily are reduced into types. It helps keep the film from finding false notes of victory. When Northup’s 12 years are up and he’s finally freed, he finds no retribution and only his own personal victory. As he’s driven away, he leaves every other character behind, still slaving or enslaved. 

We’re currently living through a time in this country in which a great many people find it politically convenient not to know things about our history, to play fast and loose with facts and behave cavalier towards context. We’re living in a time when people of a certain political persuasion can not only seriously speak lies like slavery was “a blessing in disguise” or that the South’s economy was not built on the backs of slaves, but have a great many people believe such erroneous sentiments. Here is a film that lays out the facts of history unblinking, in all its horror and heartbreak, in all its soul-draining sinfulness and tells us to look at just one story, to feel just a fraction of centuries of pain, and to see anew our history as it is recreated in front of our eyes.

The Lost Girl: MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE

Where are we? When are we? As Martha Marcy May Marlene opens we see men and women working in fields and a farmhouse, chopping wood, harvesting, laundering, cooking. At the end of the day, the men eat slowly, quietly, huddled around a dark table in a dark kitchen. They slowly file out and the women take their place, finally their turn to eat the meal. The sun sets. Members of this group go to sleep on mattresses packed on the floor of unfurnished rooms.

In the haze of daybreak, one of the young women (Elizabeth Olsen) slips away from the farmhouse, across the fields and comes upon a thick slice of asphalt breaking up the natural world and helping to narrow down the period of time in which she lives. She crosses the road and disappears into the forest beyond. We follow her as she seems to escape, eventually ending up in a modern small town where she uses the pay phone outside of the diner to call her sister. “Martha?” her sister says. “Where are you?”

We learn that Martha’s family hasn’t heard from her in two years, knowing only vaguely that she was “upstate” with a “boyfriend.” Her sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), and Lucy’s husband, Ted (Hugh Dancy), pick her up and drive her back to their vacation house. They quickly decide to take her in, to help he get on her feet. They seem remarkably uncurious as to where Martha has been or what happened to her. Something is so very wrong here that, though this couple’s attempts at kindness is sympathetic, their situational blind spots contribute to the film’s dread. How can they so easily ignore the warning signs that this young woman is so troubled?

After all, what could explain her behavior? She seems, in subtle ways, unaccustomed to what we would call a relatively normal life. The house in which she now lives is an expansive wood-and-glass lakeside domicile surrounded by woods. It’s modern yet secluded, different from where she was, but with resonances of reminders. She will cast her gaze nervously about her surroundings, as if anticipating sudden danger, or else remembering the possibility. The married couple can’t quite see how disturbed Martha is. There are unspoken histories between these characters, familial tensions that are teased out with some subtlety by the capable cast.

The full extent of Martha’s previous two years is slowly parceled out by the film, which slips between the two time periods with chilling silkiness in the editing. We continually return to that farmhouse with the eerie timeless quality of the dress and codes of conduct. We come to learn that the group of people living there are all enthralled by a cult leader (John Hawkes, seemingly effortlessly disquieting) who slowly draws his victims in with his soft-spoken philosophizing and simply plucked guitar compositions, creating a sense of community. Then, we come to understand how he uses psychological domination and torture as well as ritualized patterns of behavior, a strict work ethic, an unflinching schedule, and punishing initiations including shocking violence and rape, to control and retain his followers. As what we know more about Martha’s time amongst these people, the darker and more disturbing the implications grow.

As the trauma of her time in the cult regularly intrudes upon the film’s present tense, the collision draws the atmosphere into the same haze of paranoia and aftershocks of anxiety that Martha is feeling. This is remarkably assured debut work for the writer-director Sean Durkin who keeps the focus on fuzzy compositions and ominously open spaces in the blocking and backgrounds of shots. (In some ways it reminded me a bit of Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman, but that’s a fairly obscure connection for the benefit of what is likely to be only a small portion of those reading this). The visual style of the picture matches Martha’s fuzzy mental state, clear and warm at times, but all-too-soon giving way to confusion and cold, unflinching traumatic memories. It’s a slow mystery – what is the full extent of the awfulness of what happened to her, and will she get the help she needs? – that is in some ways a slow-motion horror movie. One sequence late in the film is a like a quieter, simpler, though no less startling, version of something right out of a slasher flick.

The film tells the story of Martha’s steps towards a new, better life, tying it relentlessly to the slow and steady reveal of what she must overcome. It took great courage for her to escape her situation, but is it possible for Martha to outrun her past? We are given reason for hope, but as the end credits crash in, it’s still very much a tense, pressing, frustratingly unanswerable open question. In that moment, the film reveals itself to be a bit too teasing in its restraint to be fully believed (I’m tempted to call it Haneke lite). But it’s overall an undeniably effective piece of filmmaking and a strong debut.