An excellent and necessary film

Films are judged by many measures. Three I often use are (1) a film’s excellence, which includes the various aspects of a film’s creation: its direction, writing, acting, cinematography; (2) its importance, which includes what it teaches about life and our world, new insights into humanity and challenges to us about how we respond to people; and (3) its emotional impact.

Many films fit one of these categories; only a few each year seem to fit all three. 12 Years a Slave is one of these rare films. It is outstanding in all aspects of its creation; it is an important, I venture to say necessary, film for people, especially Americans, to see; and it leaves viewers with strong feelings of sadness and anger.

Now let me offer a caveat to the second point. This is a difficult film to watch. The violence and dehumanization it depicts are horrendous. And the film’s director, Steve McQueen, doesn’t let us turn away quickly. The camera lingers on many scenes holding us there so that we cannot look away.

12 Years a Slave is adaptation of the 1853 autobiography Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northrup, a free black man who was kidnapped in Washington, D.C., in 1841 and sold into slavery. He worked on plantations in the state of Louisiana for 12 years before his release.

Writer John Ridley makes excellent use of detail throughout the film and creates a variety of characters so that neither slaves nor slaveholders are seen as a type but as individuals. Slaveholders vary, for example, from owner William Ford (played by Benedict Cumberbatch), who is relatively kind and saves Northrup’s life, to Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), an extremely racist and abusive planter who believes his right to abuse his slaves is enumerated in the Bible. The slaves as well have particular stories, from Eliza (Adepero Oduye), who weeps endlessly for her children, who were sold to a different owner, to Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), who picks the most cotton of any worker by a wide margin and is frequently raped by Epps, yet remains strong and resilient.

The performances in this film are consistently good, but several stand out. Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Solomon Northrup. He shows the shock of being treated as a slave when he is in reality a free man, and he portrays vividly the agony of his suffering at the hands of the slavemasters and overseers. His changing posture becomes part of his portrayal of the change slavery creates in a person. Fassbender and Nyong’o’s performances also stand out in their power to make us see them as real, complicated human beings.

McQueen, who is British, paces the film well and inserts occasional scenes from nature that juxtapose their beauty with the horror the slaves are enduring. And the music by Hans Zimmer is appropriately understated. Here, too, the juxtaposition between Northrup’s fiddle playing (he is a trained musician) and its setting in a plantation where he is a slave, adds to the emotional impact of the film. And when a group of slaves sing a spiritual at the funeral of an old slave, it is a powerful moment that speaks to the persistent faith and hope that helped them endure such injustice.

12 Years a Slave is both excellent and important. Though difficult to watch, it keeps before us the necessary truth that our country held people in legal servitude for many years, and that servitude represented a great evil. We dare not forget that.

This gets my vote, thus far, as the best film of 2013.