How It Hurts Me Inside: SMALL AXE

Filmmaker Steve McQueen’s Small Axe, a collection of five feature-length films, might be his most impressive work to date. And he’s no slouch, responsible as he is for the brutal historical drama 12 Years a Slave and the exciting Chicago crime and corruption thriller Widows. This latest project is both wide-ranging and narrowly specific, encompassing a variety of moods and situations in an exploration into the lives of West Indian immigrants in London across a number of decades. It’s of a piece with his filmmaking interests in bodies in spaces — with everything from Cynthia Erivo’s tense running in Widows to Michael Fassbender’s wasting away in Hunger or swinging full frontal Shame, McQueen is a director who wants to put on screen bodies and what they can do in relation to what they reveal about character, and what it says about the spaces they’re allowed. His work is about bodies commodified, objectified, enjoyed, adrift, expressed — but above all else: alive. Here, across five separate stories with related thematic interests, we see immigrants taking up space in a land of white hegemony used to relating to these othered bodies as colonizers, and therefore still leery about seeing them as equal neighbors.

What elevates this project above McQueen’s other accomplished works is the way this interest is allowed its loosest expression, with an observational warmth and interpersonal beauty as actors’ behaviors guide a loving camera, which turns a well-worn eye on injustice without lingering in the pain. Its emphasis is on catharsis, on righteousness, on the frustrations and setbacks and wrestling with the mess of life. It’s that mess that makes of race relations the stuff of drama here, but modulated effectively, sometimes as foreground, sometimes as background, sometimes as implication. Roughly speaking, the five movies break down into: two films of a community built by rising up in opposition to or apart from a White culture (Mangrove and Lovers Rock), one about a Black man who hopes to change a racist system from the inside (Red, White and Blue), and two about Black men forged in the cauldron of racist systems (Alex Wheatle and Education). That they work together — as one expansive mural portrait of a time and a place and a people — and separately — as stand-alone works with varied topics and approaches — is part of the pleasures herein.

In Mangrove, culture creates connections, and walls off those who’d view those creating this culture with suspicion. Hence the tension. The film is about a restaurant which, due to its all-black patrons, draws the ire of Notting Hill police. It’s the 70s. A protest against law enforcement’s prejudicial treatment of this establishment ends up turning chaotic as the police apply their brutal bludgeoning tactics. Accused of provoking a riot, the owner (Shaun Parkes) and a handful of Black Panthers (including Letitia Wright—appropriate casting, that) are put on trial where they must face the unblinking and unthinking prejudice from the system that started the whole problem in the first place. An early scene of a raid at the restaurant lingers on a ladle clattering on the floor; a scene during the trial hangs behind a jail cell door as an unfairly accused man screams as he’s locked away for contempt after trying to point out the flaws in the judge’s approach. How galling what's considered equally expendable. The film’s a blood-boiling work of docudrama, so clearly arranged and carefully paced, and so attuned to the theatrical flourishes and grand opportunities for speeches and rhetoric in a captivating hot-button trial. (One wonders how anyone involved in the flat and broad and dull Trial of the Chicago 7 wouldn’t feel embarrassed by the comparison.) In these scenes, the protestors and the law are divided by the architecture and furniture of the courtroom. Their neighborhood oasis is invaded by suspicion. They’re simply fighting for the right to be left alone.

It’s this subtext that carries over into Lovers Rock, which contains a swooning immediacy and intimacy in group dynamics. Taking place entirely at an underground dance club in 1980, a tight, sweaty, and close quarters house party, the film finds its cast hiding away from the racist established party halls that wouldn’t have them. Set to a booming playlist and a jocular DJ, the movie finds a perfect encapsulation of how a shared set of cultural consumption — music, food, and slang, lovingly captured in process and effect— can knit a group closer together. When Carl Douglas’ “Kung Fu Fighting” starts, the crowd erupts with pleasure and delight, immediately slow-mo chopping along with goofy grins. Later, the electrifyingly falsetto “Silly Games” makes for a great slow-dance groove so intoxicating the group just keeps singing it even after the record stops spinning. The lilting attempts at the high notes and steady shuffle of feet is beautifully amateur, with a wondrously spontaneous outpouring of connection. Here’s a group safe and away from the cares of their days — although, of course, there are tremors of disjunction and disagreement spilling into the margins. But for these fleeting moments, they’re lost in the music, and in each other. McQueen, true to his interests, films bodies in close proximity to each other, capturing unspoken connections, slow grinds of seduction, and soft sweet flirtations. All the while the music thumps away until the early morning denouement. In a year that kept us apart, what a thrill to watch a movie capture this feeling of togetherness.

But if those two features are about community inside out, Red, White, and Blue takes an outsider in. Here John Boyega plays a scientist in 1983 who decides to change careers after he witnesses police attack his innocent father. Rather than fight that system from the outside — we saw how difficult that can be in the first film — he goes right into it. He signs up for the police academy with all good intentions, and we watch as he makes some progress before his hope erodes. Boyega plays a finely tuned arc that never tips its hand. He gives his character room to make believable well-intentioned decisions and strategic errors alike, never falling into overly proscribed preconceived ideas. It plays with the iconography of the policier with its matter-of-fact distance and just-the-facts crispness to the staging. But it’s enlivened by a sense of determination, and a sly humor to the outrageous absurdities of departmental racism. (It also doesn’t pass up the meta wink inherent in the scene where Boyega tells a buddy he wants to join “the Force.”) There’s a driving urgent collision between his desire to change the system while those closest to him worry the system will change him first. Set against the context of the other films in this grouping, McQueen makes it clear the degree of difficulty in approaching institutionalized bigotry of this, or any, kind, from any angle.

It’s an idea that reaches a culmination in the final two features in the project, which are the shortest, smallest, and most intently focused on the experience of one individual. In Alex Wheatle, the title character is a young man sentenced to prison for his role in a 1981 protest. There we watch the casual cruelty of incarceration as it shapes this man’s perspective. It’s among the most interior of these pictures, and McQueen brings his usual psychological immediacy to watching the situation’s toll. It’s a perspective that carries over into Education, a tightly drawn drama exploring 1970s trends in education that caused a disproportionate number of Black students to be siphoned off from mainstream schools into institutions of special education. Both these shorter features are as naturalistic as the others, but take on a shorter lens, a grainier closeness to the subjects, and watch as the sledgehammer subtlety of bureaucratic prejudice weighs heavily on those under its control. It’s responsive without being reductive. Taken together with the other works, McQueen has built up a portrait of a people and a place, a study of contrasts, collisions, consequences and contexts for which people cry out for justice. Its empathetic specificity is its individual strength, and its wide lens builds complexity into its cumulative power as a story of prejudice and perseverance.

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.