'12 Years A Slave'

Two Hours Of Fear & Misery

And the bad news is that for the audience, it only lasts 2hours to passively absorb the blight on human history that is slavery. The moment you consider the millions subjected to this practice for their lifetimes, your eyes water and and your throat dries and you can't sleep with this deep anger. The alienation, the humiliation, the violence, the sadism the unrepentant cruelty. The funny thing is the society doing all this to black people could rationalise all this with scripture, and if they were shown the works of Marquis de Sade, they would ave found it abhorrent. And so the mind boggles at the depths of hypocrisy.

I've long avoided watching this film because frankly who wants to buy into this as an experience. It's not cathartic. It's just difficult, right? Well, it's still very much worth going through.

What's Good About It

It gives one a proper glimpse into the horror. A glimpse is enough to set you back reeling. And you know it's just a glimpse. This is no pat celebration of human will in adversity - it's just dressed up that way so the film can finish. But this film could have gone on for hours more, detailing the fear and misery in much fine detail and not been overstating its case.

It's actually a resounding denunciation of America's South. It makes 'The Help' look like a hot steaming turd of self-justification. It gives life to what is at the heart of Gospel music and the Blues. It sheds light to the deep humiliation and anger of a people brought into the new world in chains, and how we're trying to reconcile it away today by papering over the great injustice. And if we're not black, we're all guilty of this because the horror of slavery is too hard to look at front on. Believe me, this film looks at it front on.

What's Bad About It

Pass. There probably are aesthetically bad things and inaccurate things. But I am overwhelmed by the fear and misery this film provides to even cast my mind to them. It's simply not relevant to ask. This is a powerful film that overcomes any technical fault it might have.

What's Interesting About It

The really frustrating thing - even though it is probably true in the way it happened - is that it takes a decent white man to rescue the main character from his plight. It's a white man's world in 1853. You know it's true and yet it takes Brad Pitt to save the day. Nothing has changed since 1853. :)

Jokes aside, the male white slave owners are played by Brits. One can imagine how the casting went. Cumberbatch plays the good slave owner while Michael Fassbender plays a most terrifying slave owner. Cumberbatch's character brings for the question "can there ever be anything that could be said to be a 'good' slave owner?", while Fassbender's character is a bible-quoting Sadist. So much so that it makes Tarrantino's 'Django Unchained' look like an everyday sort of thing in the world of slavery.  Tarrantino might have had to bend and rack his brains to come up with the most sadistic things to put in his film, but it has nothing on the brutal emotional truth of this film.