12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

[DarkImbecile]

I don't think of Django as making audiences uncomfortable at all, because for all the horror of the film's depictions of slavery and its perpetrators, it also gives the audience the catharsis of the protagonist's brutal revenge and ultimate triumph, where 12 Years makes the viewer confront the shallow naivete of the Tarantino approach (as enjoyable as it can be on its own merits). There is no easy revenge for, escape from, or solution to a moral disaster on this scale - as the last two centuries have illustrated - and 12 Years confronts this quagmire more effectively by far than movies that might have individual scenes of more shocking brutality.

[adavis53]

Oh I'm definitely not arguing for Django Unchained as a whole to be something which more powerfully tackles slavery or ultimately makes its audiences uncomfortable at all, I'm specifically referring to the mandingo fighting scene (the victims of which don't get nearly as much of a reprieve as Django does, with the winner only being freed by Django in confusion later) as being one which I found more discomforting than a lot of 12 Years a Slave. I'd also comment similarly upon the scene where D'Artagnan is killed, but again, these are definitely singular standout moments of Tarantino's film as a whole, I would never qualify it as one seriously confronting slavery.

and you make a very good point about the emotional brutality of the film. But the people who I saw the film with and who have talked about it with have only ever commented upon the last scene you mentioned, which is the most violent one in the film. I also think that the first two ones you mentioned get relatively glossed over by the film's end (and again I'm speaking after not having seen it in several months and from the bias of not having enjoyed it). The main strength of film is its ability to leave you with images stuck in your head, and those emotionally brutal ones are easily pushed aside by the whipping and the hanging scene. Again, my point about the hanging scene being the most powerful in the film may be emphasized by yours, as its an incredible image that carries unfathomable pain, dehumanization, and suffering with it. At least from a personal point, that is the image which carried the most emotion and has been the most haunting to me over many others.

[DarkImbecile]

Very good point about the lack of indelible images to go with some of the more emotionally/psychologically powerful moments; maybe it has to do with some of my particular circumstances (I live in the Delta area of Mississippi and saw the film there), but the sheer oppressive weight of those less visually provocative but, to me at least, more profoundly affecting moments was palpable... a smothering, lingering burden compared to the sudden, sharp shocks of the more viscerally brutal moments.

Even the shots of the scenery - the Spanish-moss-draped bayous and the seemingly eternal green flatness of the fields - probably because they're so familiar to me, really enhanced the atmosphere of insidious immorality and inescapable history.

[Black Hat]

The problem with this film for me is that it left me completely cold to the plight of its protagonist. Maybe that's my fault as a viewer that being kidnapped into slavery wasn't enough to connect me but I'd argue that I knew the story going in therefore there should have been something, some way to make me feel his misfortune, his pain, his struggle of being a slave in a fresh way than what I've read in history books or documentaries. As opposed to giving me this man's story, it seemed to be more of a formula film of a man wronged who just happened to be a slave. That said there were opportunities to make the film far more interesting but every time McQueen came to that fork in the road he went the safe route until ultimately Brad Pitt rides in to save the day. A very ordinary movie about what is an extraordinary story.

[matrixschmatrix]

I felt for the protagonist intensely, so it's possible that you personal experiences reflect something about you, rather than something intrinsic to the film.

[Black Hat]

Of course you feel for him, as you would anyone, but it didn't seem to be much more than a man wronged story and the character wasn't interesting enough for me to care much about what happened to him. What made you care about Solomon the character? Has to be more in my opinion than the situation he found himself in.

[matrixschmatrix]

Why?

[Black Hat]

Why?

Why am I asking you or why does there need to be more?

[matrixschmatrix]

Why does there need to be more? He's a human being- and to me, Ejiofor's humanity certainly comes across undiminished throughout- in a situation into which no human being ought ever to be put. Why is that insufficient grounds for empathy and identification?

[knives]

The film doesn't do much to convince one that he is a human. The characterization is poor (if not Mel Gibson poor).

[kingofthejungle]

I don't think of the film's violence as being visually shocking nearly as much as emotionally brutal; a few whippings and hangings are surely not going to elicit a reaction on that front from those accustomed to the last ten years of torture porn, but the emotional savagery on screen, not least the scenes in which

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a woman is casually permanently separated from her children, or Fassbender's character's wife abuses his slave "mistress", or Solomon being forced to flay a fellow slave's skin

But each of those emotional brutalities has been expressed before, and often with greater passion (seriously, watch Mandingo) than we see in 12 Years A Slave. I don't think McQueen has made a bad film, but compared to the few truly great films made on the subject (Mandingo, Walsh's Band of Angels) it felt wholly redundant. 12 Years A Slave made me feel sorry for the suffering of the slaves, the other films I mentioned cast a broader net, and made me ashamed of the entire human race.

[Black Hat]

Fair question. As I said earlier for me it has mostly to do with knowing what this is all about going in, therefore there has to be a pull or a drive to make you care about this character. The film's success or failure doesn't depend on his plight it depends on our interest in his plight because what outweighs it is first that this remains a film and second that Solomon is still a character. I didn't feel that either were particularly gripping or connecting with me on levels beyond the situation Solomon found himself in. There should be more than that.

[Black Hat]

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The end of the movie where he reunites with his family is supposed to be this tremendously moving moment but it it wasn't, at all. If anything it was a little disorienting because you weren't sure at first who was who. That's a big problem when your hero is finally having his triumphant moment and it completely falls flat.

[domino harvey]

Black Hat, I wrote earlier about this but I had the same problems with the protagonist's characterizations and that final scene as well, so you're not alone

[matrixschmatrix]

Hmm. It's a movie that I had a huge emotional response to but which I'm still not certain that I like, so it's possible we're not coming at it from that different a place; the movie made me feel impotent rage at the system that turned people into farm machinery, and I thought it did a decent job of giving one an impressionistic feeling of how shocking and intolerable that life is to someone who was not born to it, a depiction based more on grinding hopelessness than specific (however accurate) atrocities. I'm just not sure that accomplishing that makes it a great movie, necessarily, though I can't fully put my finger on what more it would need or where else it could have gone.

[knives]

I'd still point to Django Unchained as the what more. I suppose there is an admirable side to taking something like slavery out of the theoretical, though again I think Tarantino and Fleischer (heck even Russ Meyer) did that better, but that doesn't necessarily make it a good movie. Taking into account the poor characterization and how ill fitting some stylistic choices are (the impressionism you mention) the end result feels like the minimum amount of success needed for the project. Showing in a visceral way the atrocities should be the starting point, not the end point.

[Black Hat]

Matrix, my question for you is, was that a rage that didn't exist before you saw the film?

[Black Hat]

Showing in a visceral way the atrocities should be the starting point, not the end point.

I think the film would have been far more interesting if it gave us a better idea of who he was and what he had lost. I think what made this story incredibly interesting was for the most part completely ignored in favor of a 'hi, this was slavery let me show you how awful it was'. There's nothing wrong with doing that but certainly nothing particularly groundbreaking from a cinematic standpoint, which in many circles was how this film was being treated.

[hearthesilence]

Wow, I'm surprised people here had absolutely no empathy to Solomon. I certainly did, but to be fair, I would argue that those moments were ones that weren't driven by dialogue. (The scenes where Solomon would verbally express his despair left me a little cold simply because they seemed too conventional.)

Three in particular stand out:

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1) When Solomon hangs on the tree, struggling to stay on his toes to keep himself alive. His fellow slaves don't even cut him down, they generally behave as if regular life on the plantation must go on, even if they're horrified. It's a surreal touch that's used at least one other time in the film - the contrast between what's happening in the foreground vs. the background in the same static wide shot. I think they really convey what it's like to live under a traumatic everyday reality - you don't necessarily go numb to it, but it's a surreal experience when you can still respond emotionally to how horrible things are and yet act and behave in a way that completely contradicts how you feel.

2) When the ship docks, Solomon's flashback after he seeing a fellow kidnapped African-American "freed" by his owner. This whole sequence is amazing. The only dialogue Solomon has is in the shop, when he discusses what he wants to purchase. It just works on multiple levels, the way he remembers that moment of another black man looking at him in envy and maybe wonder (a black man treated like a white man by a white shopkeeper), the way that same person is then taken away and probably reprimanded by his owner, and how all of this plays against his current situation. The kidnapped man was saved because he was not free, he had an owner. It's strange to suddenly envy someone else for that reason.

3) The burial, which climaxes as a long, unbroken take of Solomon in despair, surrounded by the other slaves. They aren't really seen - I think they're out of focus and framed out - but we hear them, and it's a scene that to me drives home the connection religion and spiritual music has always had in the civil rights movement. It also makes a strong connection between this film and McQueen's earlier ones.

Solomon's entire world is now dominated by the wrong people who have been empowered to abuse him and strip him of humanity. At this point, it even seems that those who are aware of this great wrong are marginalized or silenced, out of fear, conformity, etc. Just existing now feels like entrapment. I'm not a religious man, but I always felt that sacred music was a believer's way of getting close to God, or at least trying to. Musically it seemed that way - notes that seem to strain up to something that's always beyond their physical reach. I always got the sense that one would feel that way too. (Just listen to Aretha Franklin at the end of her cover for "People Get Ready.") For Solomon, who's never shown much spirituality until this point in the film, it's a way of transcending his physicality, of sending himself beyond the reach of this horrible world. It doesn't get him anywhere, but at this point, I can understand why he tries and I do think it's a powerful, moving moment.

[domino harvey]

We empathize as we would with any human suffering. I don't feel anything else for him since he's not a fleshed out character-- I know next to nothing about him despite spending two-plus hours with him

[DarkImbecile]

In addition to being at least the partly the result of the screenplay's adherence to only the details available in the source material. the lack of pre-kidnapping characterization beyond "this is a decent man, with a wife and children, free to live his own life" seemed intentional (and effective) to me; it's almost defiant in the way it forces you to relate with his ordeal on the most basic and human of levels, not because he's a compelling character. It may not have worked for everyone, but by stripping away more conventional (and possibly superficial) reasons to care about what happens to this man ("I hope he makes it, he's so charming/attractive/funny/sad/good/etc...."), the film basically forces you to empathize with Solomon solely in that he's a human being caught up in an inhuman institution, and could be any person in the audience similarly unlucky.

The even more impressive feat, in my opinion, is that in addition to investing the viewer in the protagonist's story, it also demonstrates the varying levels dysfunction and misery slavery brings into the lives of almost every character it touches, black or white. As abominable as his character behaves for almost his entire screen time, it's hard not to feel a kind of pity for Fassbender's plantation owner... or his hateful wife, or Benedict Cumberbatch's naively well-meaning slave-owner.

Clearly, everyone's mileage varies in response to McQueen's and Ridley's approach to this material, but I think re-watching the film without the expectation of a more traditionally sympathetic protagonist might change some opinions.

[criterion10]

I really liked 12 Years a Slave, though I certainly wouldn't argue with anyone who takes issue with Solomon's lack of depth. For the most part, I felt as though his character was actually portrayed with a certain sense of distance. The audience does feel sympathy for him for what's on the surface, most notably the cruelty he endures. McQueen's way of developing him though as a character and causing us to care for him is more through this very cruelty and different individual moments (i.e. slowly beginning to sing along with the other slaves at the funeral, the everlasting shot of Solomon staring off into the distance) than through actually developing the individual person that he is.

[bdsweeney]

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The end of the movie where he reunites with his family is supposed to be this tremendously moving moment but it it wasn't, at all. If anything it was a little disorienting because you weren't sure at first who was who. That's a big problem when your hero is finally having his triumphant moment and it completely falls flat.

I felt much the same way towards the ending ... and towards much of the film. Of course, I flinched at certain visceral moments but I felt strangely emotionally disconnected during much of the film. This is not to say I thought the film was entirely flat. In particular:

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the shot held on Ejiofor's face as he rode on the carriage away from the plantation. It was during that shot that the emotional impact of Northup's experience impacted me greatest. Far more so than the scenes with the family that followed soon after.

I thought that fading out to the credits at that moment would have been a better conclusion.

[domino harvey]

Coming soon to a high school classroom near you

[colinr0380]

Coming soon to a high school classroom near you

Aren't the high schools going to have to take Manderlay off the curriculum first?