The Good Things to Come

I began this blog in January of 2013. It seems I chose a good year to start because it’s been a great year to write about movies. Though unevenly distributed –the good ones concentrate towards the end of the year—2013 was a great watch.  I can truthfully say that I can’t chose one movie as my favorite because there have been some really good films out there, but so very different and good in different ways, that it’s hard to choose the top one, so I’m going for the Top Ten, like most movie sites.

The caveat to my top ten is that despite living in a fairly large city in the south, with some film festivals, technology and tools like the Internet, Netflix, Hulu, and Red Box, I haven’t been able to see many non-English language films (“ foreign films” in the US), or documentaries,  so I guess I can’t completely recommend the best films of 2013. But this is why I’ve created the chart that follows this commentary. The chart holds my picks, but also the Top Ten of 2013 for my favorite movie critics. I don’t always agree with one or the other, but A.O. Scott of the New York Times and Peter Traverse of Rolling Stone magazine are usually my best guides; to a lesser degree Manola Darghis also of the New York Times. I’ve also included the French film magazine that was my guide in my more youthful days, Cahiers du Cinema, with which in more recent years I tend to agree with less, more on a feminist basis than anything (I dislike misogynistic films or films where actresses have been mistreated, which some critics overlook when analyzing films), but it will add the non-English films to the list.

Inside Llewyn Davis

As a “reality check” of the forces that drive film these days –i.e. the industry- I am also including a column of the Top Ten films that made most money at the box office in the United States. It will come as no surprise that there are very few films on the critics’ lists that are also top money makers, the exception that confirms the rule being Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (it’s Oscar chances rise by leaps and bounds).

12 Years a Slave

Box office information is not something to disdain in today’s world, since it is increasingly a predictor of trends. In North American ticket sales alone $10.9 billion dollars were made; that’s the yearly economy of many a country in the world. It’s also important in terms of trends and the future of film itself, especially now that there so many movie streaming sites like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon,  and the gazillion other non-legal ones, as well as new Cable TV series and movies.  It is interesting to note, as the New York Times does, that “Combined, three presumed best picture contenders — “Nebraska,” “Her” and “Inside Llewyn Davis” — have been seen by roughly one-tenth of the more than 10 million viewers who tuned in to the last episode of “Breaking Bad.””. I loved the last episode of Breaking Bad, so this is a cautionary tale for movie producers, directors and critics. No serious documentary made a deep impression at the box office, so there is another.

American Hustle

For those of us who survive by film we’ll still end the year with a sigh of relief for we know that, whatever the medium chosen, there are young and middle aged film makers out there, along with actors, cinematographers, illustrators, screenwriters, and more, raising the bar and excelling. They are a promise of more good things to come and that makes for a Happy New Year to all!

TOP TEN 2013

Surviving by Film	Rolling Stone Peter Traverse	The New York Times A.    O. Scott	The New York Times Manola Darghis	Cahiers du Cinema
Nebraska (Alexander Payne)	12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen)	Inside Llewyn  Davis (Joen & Ethan Coen)	12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen)	Stranger by the Lake ( Alain Guiraudie)
12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen)	Gravity  (Alfonso Cuaron)	12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen)	American Hustle (David O. Russel)	Spring Breakers ( Harmony Korine)
Fruitvale Station (Ryan Coogler)	The Wolf of Wall Street  (Martin Scorcese)	Blue Is the Warmest Colour (Abdellatif Kechiche)	Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen)	Blue Is the Warmest Colour (Abdellatif Kechiche)
Inside Llewyn  Davis  (Joen & Ethan Coen)	Before Midnight (Richard Linklater)	Enough Said (Nicole Holofcener)	Behind the Candelabra (Steven Soderbergh)	Gravity (Alfonso Cuaron)
American Hustle (David O. Russel)	Her (Spike Jonze)	A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhang Ke)	Captain Philips (Paul Greengrass)	A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhang Ke)
The Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallée)	American Hustle (David O. Russel)	All is Lost (J.C. Chandor)	The Counselor  ( Ridley Scott)	Lincoln (Steven Spielberg)
Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)	Captain Philips (Paul Greengrass)	Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)	The Grandmaster (Wang Kar-wai)	Jealousy (Philippe Garrel)
Captain Philips (Paul Greengrass)	Nebraska (Alexander Payne)	Hannah Arendt (Margarethe von Trotta)	The Great Beauty	Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (Hong Sang-soo)
Philomena (Stephen Frears)	Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen)	Lee Daniels’ The Butler (Lee Daniels)	Her (Spike Jonze)	You and the Night (Yann Gonzalez)
Lee Daniels’ The Butler  (Lee Daniels)	Inside Llewyn Davis – Joen & Ethan Coen	Tie* (see below).	Inside Llewyn  Davis (Joen & Ethan Coen)	La Bataille de Solferino (Justine Triet)

*Tie for 10th: The Great Gatsby, The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorcese), The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola), Spring Breakers, Pain and Gain, American Hustle.

TOP TEN BOX OFFICE: Iron Man, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Despicable Me 2, Man of Steel, Monsters University, Frozen, Gravity, Fast and Furious Six, Oz the Great and Powerful, Star Trek Into Darkness.

Despicable Him

I usually reserve my posts for movies I like, so I debated writing about The Wolf of Wall Street. The exception I make is for films directed by someone I admire and Martin Scorsese, who directs this film, is prominent among directors I like, so here goes.

The movie is based on the true story of Jordan Belfort, a corrupt stockbroker who overindulged in drugs, sex and stealing other people’s money. I wish I could say that the movie is loosely based on this white collar criminal, because seeing the debauchery, the cruelty and downright insanity of that lifestyle, it’s hard to believe such things occur, again, with other people’s money; hard-working, middle class people’s money, but the movie is based on the autobiography of the same name. In an interview, Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays the Belfort criminal on screen, talked about: “This hedonistic lifestyle, this time period in Wall Street’s history where Jordan basically gave in to every carnal indulgence possible and was obsessed with greed and obsessed with himself essentially. He was so unflinching in his account of this time period and so honest and so unapologetic in this biography, I was compelled to play this character for a long period of time”.  And play him to the last detail is what he does, which kind of makes you wonder about this rich, model-dating, fast-living actor.

There are many disappointments here. First and foremost is the fact that Belfort, who only did 22 months prison for the theft (fraud) he committed, the truly despicable main character of this film, received a million dollars for the rights to make the film based on his autobiography and will receive royalties from the movie. I wish I hadn’t paid to see it! A warning would have been great as you entered this movie: “a portion of your ticket payment will be directed at keeping Belfort rich”. I don’t understand why seemingly progressive people, like Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, who supposedly made this film as a “reflection of everything that’s wrong in today’s society” wouldn’t see how contradictory –if not downright stupid- this ends up being.

Jordan Belfort is not only the man who scammed millions off working class people, but also a man who allowed his co-workers to throw short people at a bulls eye as sport, and spoke of them in the most demeaning and dehumanizing way; a man who humiliated a female co-worker shaving her head (for money); who brought sex-workers to his office, on planes, in his home on bacchanals that rivaled the romans at their worst; who in his drug-addled state risked the life of his child and many others who crossed his path, on land and sea. In an interview, DiCaprio talks about how Belfort has turned his life around. Hmm. He still owes millions of dollars to the working class people he ripped off with his penny-stock trading scam, something that was part of his agreement to get a reduced sentence; he has neglected his payments, despite the money he is making. And he still is making money by telling people how to get rich. So much for change.

Trying to forget that incongruous aspect of this film, which is really, really hard to do, and looking at it from the perspective of the directing, acting, screen writing and all, this film is still a disappointment. The movie is three hours long, cut down from four, but it could easily have been cut down to two for all it had to say; it draws out scenes incessantly and unnecessarily and ends up being incredibly repetitive. If the point was to make us sick of seeing such depravity, that might have worked if the movie wasn’t so Hollywood-Life-of-the-Rich-and-Famous in style; extreme debauchery and cruelty have been used as a way to cause rejection from the audience, such as with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s anti-fascist film Saló, from which you leave downright sick, but The Wolf of Wall Street is not, I believe, having that effect on the audience, in particular, not the modern, young, male audience. From comments overheard and the guffaws, it would seem that males, quite used to pornography these days, are seeing past the sex in the movie and probably focusing on how fast the guy made his money, how great his yacht with a helipad was, how cool Leo dressed and how funny and fun the frat games and partying at that office were.

Nothing remarkable about the acting either.  Leo DiCaprio doesn't have the range to embody a complex character. He comes off much like a modern day Jay Gatsby, which he also played this year, but with no love for anyone but himself. Jonah Hill is still pretty much the Jonah Hill of Superbad, 21 Jump Street and the like, but raunchier. And one can’t help but think about the graphic sex scenes (the infamous candle scene) that these actors did not use body doubles for and wonder about how that differentiates them from the man who did them first time around and wrote about them, who is supposedly being criticized in the film (or is he?).

 If the point was to raise awareness about what happens on Wall Street, the swindling and the excess of Wall Street at the expense of millions of Americans, in the most realistic way possible, I have two words for the people who made the film: Inside Job. That movie has been made and won multiple awards.

Some say this is part of a trilogy of Martin’s, one that includes Good Fellows and Casino, both about the mob. It does share with those films the greed, the depravity, the criminality of an underworld that we wish did not exist, but does; it exposes it. However, the criminals in those movies were either killed or locked up for good. The most despicable one in this film is receiving royalties from the movie. What does that say about the film and our times?

Small Town Folk like All of Us

People tend to forget that more than half the population of the United States live in small towns. A good portion of the other half, the one that lives in cities larger than 25,000 people, probably came from a small town. So, few will not recognize the folks and places that form the beautiful quilt of characters that is Alexander Payne’s Nebraska. This is a small-town film, but it is also somewhat of a road movie, something that Payne has already filmed before in Sideways and About Schmidt. In both cases, it is a poignant film very much worth seeing.

Before I dive into all the things I loved about this movie, I have to express my delight in the director, Alexander Payne himself, and the quasi documentary style he has developed in movies like Nebraska, Sideways and The Descendants; I call it so because he presents situations that ordinary, non-famous people like most of us live, without judgment and without pushing feelings or circumstances. The movies feel authentic and it is the situations we recognize in our families, our friends or acquaintances, which allow us to bring emotions to what he presents. It is noteworthy, in speaking of this documentary style, that Payne frequently uses non-actors to play minor characters in his movies; actual policemen, restaurant servers, teachers, etc. Payne also injects his films with a dry, many times dark and cynical humor, but a great sense of humor none the less. There are, after all, many things funny in even the most difficult situations.  This humor is forefront in his earlier movies, like Election (probably the best acting Reese Witherspoon has ever accomplished) or Citizen Ruth (with Laura Dern, Bruce Dern's daughter), but it also very present even in the more dramatic films like Nebraska, Sideways or The Descendants.

Bruce Dern and Will Forte in Nebraska

Nebraska is visually beautiful. It was a brilliant choice of the director to film the movie in black- and-white; mostly striking shades of gray, to tell the truth. The choice of black-and-white adds so much to the movie! The landscape, dry and barren; the small towns made more abandoned by the lack of color; the older generation, with their already white hair, and the close ups that without color add so much depth to their expressions. Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, who worked with Payne in Sideways and The Descendants, but who has also shown his skill in movies like 3:10 to Yuma, Walk the Line and The Pursuit of Happyness, does wonders with his black-and-white compositions in this film.

But it is the acting that makes this film a prize winner. Bruce Dern, who plays the grouchy, confused, old melancholic alcoholic who is Woody Grant, has already won the Best Actor prize at Cannes and is pretty much on all the best actor lists for other prizes this year. In the movie he is married to June Squib, his acid-tongued wife Kate, who not only complements his acting, but dominates a good portion of the film with her great acting as well. Will Forte plays one of their two sons, the one that decides to accompany his father on a road trip to appease Woody, who has fallen for a junk mail announcement of a million dollar sweepstake. This is probably the most questionable casting of the film since Forte is known more for his parts as a comedian and in the movie he has to play probably the most serious part of the film, the son who has lived all his life with this remote and cold man as a father, whom he has loved in this one-sided relationship. He pulls it off.

In end, Will Forte’s character reminded me of another son in another great film about parent – child relationships: Daniel Bruhl’s character, Alexander Kerner, in the great German film Good-bye Lenin; both sons are desperate to please their parents and create a closeness that never was, guided by the hope that it is never too late for it to be.

Payne is from Omaha Nebraska. He knows these small towns and their people well. Woody and his son drive from Billings Montana to a small town in Nebraska (really Plainview, but given another name in the movie), where he is reunited with his family, friends and his past. The characters unfold in the most subtle of ways, as do their life stories.  We slowly become aware of how this couple and their sons have become the distant, bitter, sharp-tongued people they are and we witness how they can still, in some strange way, be redeemed. The background of the small town, almost a ghost town, enhances these every day relationships that are, after all, what life and this movie is all about. 

All the Lonely People

The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children;
those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
Hubert H. Humphrey

There are certain very good films that one is hesitant to recommend because of how difficult they are to watch. They are films about every day, ordinary people who live and suffer in what Humphrey in the cited quote calls “the shadows of life”; their plight is not unusual and their numbers are larger than we’d care to admit. These are the movies about the darker sides of our society that haunt us because we know they exist, yet wish we could forget that they do. We can’t; not without dehumanizing ourselves.

Such a movie is The Dallas Buyers Club, directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, with the awe inspiring acting by Jared Leto and Matthew McConaughey. In brief, the movie is about a bigot; a rather lonely, very dissolute, trailer-living electrician who is diagnosed with AIDS and, since it takes place in 1985, is pretty much “sentenced to die” in a month’s time. His diagnosis ends up being a turning point in many ways and he begins to work around the medical and pharmaceutical establishment to buy himself time and a life. He does this with the unlikely partnership of a transvestite, played with remarkable realism by Mr. Leto.

 

Jared Leto in The Dallas Buyers Club

Jared Leto is an actor that lives his role with such passion, with such adherence to the part he is playing, that it sometimes feel as if we are watching a documentary. He already astounded us in another film of this type, Darren Aronofsky’s very dark Requiem for a Dream. In that movie he played a drug addict as well, the son of a working class family which is slowly falling into a social abyss. Ellen Burstyn played his mother in Requiem and despite how well Jared Leto acts in that movie, it is totally dispassionate to state that she outshines him completely. Ms. Burstyn shows us what acting is about in Requiem for a Dream. 

Ellen Burstyn and Jared Leto in Requiem for a Dream

The movie also served to confirm that the Hollywood establishment is one that would like to pretend that the people living in the shadows of life do not exist. Requiem did not receive any major nominations except for Ms. Burstyn’s acting. Jared Leto and Aronofsky were not nominated at all, and, in one of its most shameful and unfair decisions ever, the Academy chose to give Julia Roberts the Best Actress award instead of awarding Ms. Burstyn’s awe inspiring acting; it’s hard to think of someone less deserving to have beaten Ellen Burstyn in that category! That year, the Spanish actor Javier Bardem, nominated for Before Night Falls, another movie about those marginal, albeit in Cuban society, also did not win the Best Acting award.

 

Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream

Many of the kind of movies we are talking about, those that take us to the shadows, those that denounce the abandonment our society is capable of, are now made by independent film makers. With the industry side of film making becoming more and more dominant over the artistic side, it is harder to find directors employed by the larger studio systems that are willing to make them. Hollywood used to be more willing to take the monetary risk to make these films that denounce and educate. In the late sixties, famous movie directors like Sidney Pollack and John Schleisinger made movies like They Shoot Horses Don’t They, or Midnight Cowboy (respectively), with actors like Jane Fonda, Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman bringing the lonely people to the forefront. Milos Forman’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is probably one of the last of these so very hard to watch movies that took the major awards, winning 5 Oscars in 1976. That year, Sidney Lumet was nominated as Best Director for another Best Film contender, Dog Day Afternoon, a strong social commentary about other people left behind by our society.

 

John Cazale and Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon

The directing in The Dallas Buyers Club is strong as well, although the acting is certainly what stands out. Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée has already received many accolades for his earlier films, like C.R.A.Z.Y. a family drama about a young gay man and his relationship to his siblings and father, The Young Victoria, which received 3 Academy Award nominations in 2009, and Café de Flore, in 2011, which also received much praise and many awards.


It is our hope that this year films like The Dallas Buyers Club and Fruitvale Station, which are smaller budget films, but ones that give voice to the silent, forgotten and lonely people of our world, will join 12 Years a Slave and Captain Phillips on the Academy Awards’ ballot. Well made movies about life, every part of it, no matter how hard to watch, should receive the light they deserve. 

Women on Fire

In the times of Hannah Montana (Miley Cyrus) twerking with her tongue out in one of the saddest displays of sexploitation ever, it’s a great relief to have Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), the strong, and humane gladiator enthralling young girls in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. The movie is very entertaining, but above all it is a movie worth having younger audiences see, boys and girls alike, as a way to counteract what sometimes feels like a retro-sexist fad in our culture these days.

Catching Fire is based on the second book in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy, directed at tweens and teens. The novels are wonderfully well written and, unlike the Twilight books, they are not about the romance between Katniss, Peta and Gale, but rather about loss, death and violence in a society controlled by the wealthy (Panem – District 1%) at the expense of the rest of the enslaved, starving districts. It is about power, rebellion, and a future where technology and media dehumanize, intensifying and extending what is really not much more than the Roman gladiators of ancient times, where the poor or persecuted were the entertainment of the empire.

As Suzanne Collins says in an interview:

“The Hunger Games is a reality television program. An extreme one, but that's what it is. And while I think some of those shows can succeed on different levels, there's also the voyeuristic thrill, watching people being humiliated or brought to tears or suffering physically. And that's what I find very disturbing. There's this potential for desensitizing the audience so that when they see real tragedy playing out on the news, it doesn't have the impact it should. It all just blurs into one program. And I think it's very important not just for young people, but for adults to make sure they're making the distinction. Because the young soldier's dying in the war in Iraq, it's not going to end at the commercial break. It's not something fabricated, it's not a game. It's your life.”

Josh Hutcherson, Elizabeth Banks and Jennifer Lawrence in Catching Fire

Catching Fire is true to the book, which is a merit, though it does leave those that haven’t read the trilogy feeling that it is too inconclusive. Those of us who have read the three novels –at our daughter’s insistence- can say: wait and see the next movie! It only gets more interesting, especially for science fiction fans. Catching Fire, the movie, does elevate the romance part a bit, but overall it has selected the characters well, in particular Katniss, casting the very impressive young actress that Jennifer Lawrence is in that role. Also, and what is probably its greatest feat, it has been able to recreate the visual strength of the novels, using special effects, costume and set designs to create a futuristic world that, at the same time, we can parallel to the one we’re living in.

It may be that the younger audiences aren’t getting the between the lines that the novel is so full of, but at least it is showing female actors on the screen on fire about something that isn’t just catching a guy or worried about whether they’re too fat, thin or sexy (to catch a guy), or fading into wallpaper roles to a strong male lead.

Diana Rigg as Emma Peel in The Avengers

I was trying to remember what strong, intelligent, compassionate and rebellious woman role model I saw on the screen when I was a tween way back when and I can’t remember one until Ridley Scott brought Ripley to the screen to fight the Alien.  Before that there was maybe Emma Peel (the great Diana Rigg), the one who actually did the fighting in the British TV show The Avengers (1961-69). Today there are more strong female characters on television (yet still too many of the other kind), but on the big screen they are still sadly lacking. Another reason to celebrate Suzanne Collins and her Hunger Games books, which have fed a population of females starving for roles that will bring them out of their second sex status. Collins’s books have also led to a number of imitations in young reader science fiction, like the Divergent trilogy (Divergent, Insurgent and Allegiant by Veronica Roth), which already has a movie coming out in early 2014. So let the Games continue, and may the odds be ever in their favor!

Not the Old Man and the Sea*

Is it that the Sundance Kid can do anything wrong? I praise Robert Redford for his support of independent films and film makers. There is no doubt he has made great contributions to film as art with his festival. I wonder, however, if that has led many film critics to pretend that whatever he does that "appears" artsy is actually art, like his most recent endeavor All is Lost. In other words, I am surprised at the hype this movie  has created among critics. It’s on the Oscar lists for most critics, and Redford is central to its success. But then again, Gravity is getting as much or more hype and, as I've already mentioned in the post on that movie (see Lost in Space), it gravely suffers from implausibility (as many scientists have already written about in the media), which is what All is Lost shares with Gravity; apart from the fact that both movies deal with a lone person's  struggle to survive,in space or sea. How they go about surviving might be easier to believe for the Marvel-raised generation of movie goers, but to an older bunch, both seem lacking in common sense. 

All is Lost is the story of the 70 plus year old man with his small sailboat on the Indian Ocean. And stop, right there: what is a 70 plus year old man doing in the Indian Ocean, 1,700 miles from land in a small sailboat, with a teeny container of undrinkable water supply? We never find out. His sailboat is damaged when it hits a metal container full of tennis shoes. Stop again: a big, heavy, metal container full of tennis shoes is floating on the Indian Ocean, not sinking rapidly, as Robert Redford’s character, who I'm pretty sure weighs much less, does later on in the movie? The movie is about his struggle to survive. And most people that have seen the trailer to the movie know that I am revealing nothing that the trailer doesn't. That is the story, all of it. This is no Old Man and the Sea. 

Accepting the aforementioned premise, the rest of the things that occur in this movie are so ridiculous as to be rather infuriating. And allow me to be sarcastic, for I believe that is what this movie deserves. The man, whose boat –including cabinets- is made of wood, patches the hole made by the container with glue and some plastic cloth; even though we know he’s got the tools and the wood. He sees this terrible storm coming (by climbing up the mast at a terrible risk) and instead of preparing his boat for the storm, he shaves! Yes, he shaves. When the storm hits, he then gets out the storm gear and tries to put it on, with pretty pathetic consequences. When all is lost, and he must get on a rubber life raft, instead of saving the most important implements when his boat begins to sink, like clean water, a rechargeable flashlight, salt water tablets or even sun screen, he saves a box with a navigating tool (as if!…on a life raft.. navigate his way out of the Indian Ocean?); he saves his pen and notebook (maybe he was a poet?), and a rather big, clean, empty jar which, later in the movie, he will use to write and send (you guessed it) a message in a bottle!! Good grief!

And Robert Redford is being praised for his acting?! By whom, the introverts guild of America?! His face is expressionless most of the film, his eyes more than anything, (by contrast, see Tom Hanks in Captain Philips) and he barely utters a word the whole movie (people usually talk to themselves out loud when in danger, more so people in movies about people alone trying to survive; again, Tom Hanks, this time in Cast Away). He doesn't even cry out for help convincingly when a ship (two, three) go by! Yet his acting is being referred to as "career performance". Maybe it's about his endurance, as an actor of 70 plus years, being pretty much in water during all the filming.

Certainly not award worthy. And this is what is beginning to feel disquieting as the film award season creeps up, that these movies, so terribly unrealistic, so full of nonsense, might take awards away from the realism of Twelve Years a Slave or Fruitvale Station, which really have something urgent to say and have more than amazing acting. Is this to be another "The Artist" year? (Does anyone remember that Oscar winner?).

The audience in the theater where I saw it (an older bunch) were pretty much chuckling at the end of the movie. This movie goer, while chuckling along, left the theater with a rather sinking feeling.

*This post expands on a comment made in Fresh Cuts last week. The Fresh Cuts section (see tab) is updated on a more frequent basis than the posts on this blog.

A Time of Reckoning

Historical trauma. A lot more people will understand the concept once they have seen Steve McQueen’s remarkable movie Twelve Years a Slave.  The film brilliantly takes the viewer to the pre-civil war south in the United States as we accompany the black freeman Solomon Northrup who is kidnapped and sold into slavery in New Orleans in 1841. This is an autobiography, something that is impressed in your heart as you watch the brutality, the torture and inhumanity he and all other black men, women and children are subjected to by the slave owners and overseers of the cotton and sugar cane plantations in which Northrup is forced to survive. This is certainly Steve McQueen’s oeuvre and what a great one it is!  Not only has he created a movie that is visually stunning and artistically directed, where not a single shot is wasted, but he has brought history to life. This is a movie that should be used in history classes when dealing with the issue of slavery, something that would certainly help further the understanding of historical trauma as the United States continues to struggle against racial discrimination.

It is quite an experience to watch this movie in a southern state of the United States. It is impossible not to be aware that the spectators, black and white, are the descendants of enslaved people or of slave-owners. It was also a consolation to see many viewers, of all races, crying. It is no surprise that the film moves audiences to tears, McQueen is surrounded by strong talent in his story telling; he has chosen well. Sean Bobbit’s cinematography is majestic, whether we’re seeing the trees at dusk over a swamp, the rotating wheels of the riverboat cutting through the water (what great visual metaphors!), or watching the changing expressions of despair in Northrup’s eyes. The same has to be said of Hans Zimmer’s score. His music is eclectic, moving and creative to perfection. Sometimes it is silence broken only by chimes or violin solos; at others it is a full, heart reaching theme; the film also includes pieces of western classical and American folk. Overall, the music does not drive the emotions, but accompanies them.

Ejiofor and Fassbender

McQueen has also chosen his cast well and the actors give of their best performances. Four stood out to me in particular: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Lupita Nyong’o, Adepero Oduye and Michael Fassbender. We already knew that McQueen can bring out the best in Michael Fassbender. They have worked together before. In McQueen’s Shame Fassbender was brilliant playing a tortured man struggling with sex addiction; in Hunger, he was Bobby Sands, leading an IRA hunger strike. Here he is Edwin Epps, a heartless self-indulging plantation and slave owner. His acting is great. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Solomon Northrup and he is someone to watch! There is not an ounce of over-acting here, though the part could well have led a less serious actor to just that. He uses facial expressions and his eyes to speak the unspeakable. His heartbreak is in his face, as is his amazing compassion and humanity. He is all that Edwin Epps is not, which is what leads for the latter to hate him all the more. 

Lupita Nyong'o and Chiwetel Ejiofor

Two enslaved women cross Solomon’s path and burry themselves into his soul: first Eliza, also abducted, whose children are sold to other slave owners, and then Patsey, enslaved alongside him and the tragic victim of Epps’s lunatic desire. Adepero Oduye plays Eliza and though she’s not in the movie for any extended time, her howling cries linger long into the story; Oduye is very good. But it is Lupita Nyong'o, who plays Patsey, who will deserve the acting awards, if there is any rhyme or reason to awards. The scene between Nyong’o and Ejiofor, where she is making her singular request –which I will not reveal so as not to spoil the viewing- speaks volumes to the human misery that was slavery. How can a society recover from such tragedy and disgrace?

Adepero  Oduye as Eliza

It took a war among brothers to end such an abysmal and inhumane system as was slavery in the United States. It took men like Solomon Northrup, who went on to work with the Underground Railroad, to further advance the cause of racial integration; men full of humanity and kindness, the true Christians in this story.

We are now at a time when the United States is led by a black President. Yet, as another great film this year reminds us, Fruitvale Station (see post A Day in the Life), even today black youth are still shot for no other reason than for being black. These states have come a long way from the times of Solomon Northrup, but we are still at a time of reckoning. We still dream, along with Dr. King, “that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”