Nyong’o’s portrayal of the brave but traumatised Patsey is mesmerising and makes us wonder why we haven’t seen this actor before. Most notable though is Lupita Nyong’o who makes her film debut playing the slave, Patsey, with whom Epps is sexually infatuated. His perpetual drunkenness and borderline psychosis conveys the sense of decay of the slave system. Michael Fassbander is well suited to the role of the sadistic master, Edwin Epps. Yet Ojiofor is able to convey a thousand painful words simply through his beautifully expressive face and posture. At times, in an effort to remain low-key, Northup seems more like a spectator in an unfolding tragedy than the protagonist. Indeed, it is fascinating to note how little script Ojiofor actually has. He must totally render himself a chattel, nothing more than ‘prized livestock’.įrom initially being indignant and defiant, he soon becomes servile and taciturn, the consequence of numerous beatings and threats. These truths would only lead to him being singled out and killed. Northup has to learn fast that if he is to survive, he must conceal the fact that he was a freeman, that he is educated and cultured. Surviving a slave’s lifeĪ central theme of the film is the need for the slave to suppress his/her personality in order to survive the plantation. Behind him, plantation life continues and we hear the sound of slave children playing in the background, oblivious to the routine violence against their fellow slave. McQueen holds the shot for longer than we would like, forcing us to squirm in discomfort as the gasping Northup hangs hour after hour until late into the evening. A jarring and dissonant violin note plays menacingly on the soundtrack as the scene unfolds, like some kind of mockery of Northup’s skill at the violin. He is strung up by the neck and left hanging all day, avoiding suffocation only by supporting himself on tiptoes. One of the most harrowing scenes in the film is the attempted lynching of Northup. I have never seen such a realistic depiction of the injuries caused by whipping as in Twelve Years. We are made to feel every lash of the whip, every cut of the blade, every strike of the bat. McQueen’s portrayal of violence drips with reality. But it is not a violence conveyed through the comic book style of Tarantino’s Django Unchained, nor through the affected Hollywood style of Spielberg’s Amistad. Throughout the film we witness unrelenting acts of cruelty and violence by the master against slave. We say to ourselves, ‘This cannot happen to a civilised human being!’ And it is only then that we are forced to consider the unavoidable truth: that this should not happen to any human being. We are shocked because we see ourselves in Northup’s old life.
#EDWIN EPPS PLANTATION LOUISIANA FREE#
After protesting his free status to his jailor, he is beaten so hard on the back that the stick shatters. In the next scene, after having been drugged by charlatans, Northup suddenly awakes to find himself, chained, in a dank cell. It is against this backdrop that his sudden enslavement seems not only horrific, but totally illogical.
Ojiofor ably conveys the ‘normalness’ of the gentle Northup. He is educated, well spoken, well-off and plays the violin proficiently.
In some of the early scenes we see a free Northup in his pleasant home in New York with his loving wife and two children. Part of what makes Twelve Years so excruciatingly painful to watch is McQueen’s dramatic juxtaposition of Northup’s free life with his brutish life as a slave. Until the Emancipation Proclamation formally abolished slavery, the slave class fluctuated between one-third and two-thirds of the population of the southern states. The slave society of the Old South revolved around the division of people into masters and slaves. The arrival of white Europeans to the Americas brought a mix of genocide, terror, and slavery on a scale never witnessed by humanity. It tells the story of a once free man who is kidnapped and sold into slavery in the plantation fields of Louisiana in 1841, where he spends over a decade subjected to every unspeakable horror and cruelty. Based on the real-life memoirs of the black American, Solomon Northup (played by Chiwetel Ojiofor), Twelve Years a Slave is a biopic set in the antebellum era of the Old South. It’s not often that one encounters a film that is both utterly captivating and yet, from beginning to end, so uncomfortable to watch. Through virtuoso directing, former Turner Prize winner Steve McQueen has created a modern classic – one which imparts some painful truths, writes Sam Dathi
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