courtesy photo

The first hope dies with a churning boat propeller.

Stirred by a long camera take, it is the moment Solomon Northup knows he will travel south hundreds of miles past border states, that he is shackled to an assembly line designed to maim. He will experience slavery designed like that riverboat propeller, built not to err and not to stop. The industrial mechanism of human suffering will give him a uniform of scars and an unfamiliar name. He will wear them for 12 years, for the rest of his life.

Based on the 1853 memoir of the abducted freeman, 12 Years a Slave is the story of Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a professional violinist and resident of Saratoga Springs, New York. He is the happily married father of two, swindled into touring his music south and is sold into bondage by his troupe mates in Washington D.C. After waking up drugged and in chains, Northup is whipped immediately and purposefully: the film’s first intensely deliberate hope squashing and the first instance of the survivalist vs. action conundrum that will battle in Northup’s mind and spirit throughout. From there, he is shipped south to New Orleans and the belly of the beast, branded a Georgia runaway named Platt.

Wrestled from his home and family, Northup’s life has all the makings of a Homeric tale. Only director Steve McQueen and writer John Ridley, to their credit, refuse to tell it like one. That heroic projection could rob Northup’s experience of its specificity and the story of its starkness. There are no blind prophets lining an epic freedom trail, no sultry siren song and no climactic mad dash across the Mason Dixon Line.

Instead, McQueen acquaints us and Northup with a phenomenal ensemble cast by way of droplets of change, small shifts in the grinding monotony of a decade spent working for a few different plantations. Northup attracts attention from the story’s supporting characters via the organic elements of his person. Plantation owner William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch) is astounded and appreciative of Northup’s skill on the fiddle and navigating new transportation routes for his crop. Ford’s overseer John Tibeats (Paul Dano) likewise is determined to torment Northup for his overt intelligence and unusual skills. When Northup can no longer safely coexist with Tibeats, he is sold to the plantation of Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender).

The move is crucial in Northup’s story. The contrast between engineering and carpentry to picking cotton mirrors the contrast in Ford’s relative opportunistic decency and the brutal heat of Epps’ dogged cruelty. It forces Northup and all the residents of the Epps farm, notably his choice slave Patsy (Lupita Nyong’o), into an internalized kind of social Darwinism.

Fassbender, a repeat customer of McQueen’s previous two feature films Hunger and Shame devolves into full brute in 12 Years, extending his character’s intoxicating evil to a place we’ve not seen from the Irish-German actor. And for all the malice of Epps’ envy and whiskey-fueled psychosis — quoting passages from Leviticus and likening (as was the custom of the day) the slave master to God — he is the striking movement in the Georgia stillness, the volatile, tormenting cog in the machine. And in a harrowing way, he keeps Northup alive and aware of where he came from.

In another achievement for the screenwriter Ridley, we find Epps’ crazed humanity in his desperate meaning-making. He finds metaphors and symbols in the depths of his crimes from the biblical Curse of Ham to the demonic myth of his slaves cursing his cotton yield. He scratches for his own justification while his wife, Mary (Sarah Paulson), is stoic with cold calculation and menace.

What’s better, the film’s central figure is not lost to the color of his supporting cast. On the contrary, Ejiofor feeds off each one. In Patsy, he finds both a kind of daughter and an adversary: a person who reflects, at seemingly opposite times, his instincts to endure and his passion to undo his very presence in the South. Ejiofor doesn’t suffer from his exposure or from his time in front of the camera. He wears under the 12 years with a flame that comes and goes, something that endures invisibly, bursts and retreats again, like the periodic violence of the world around him.

And McQueen dives into Northup by inching the audience against the human face. These long takes, sometimes 20 and 30 seconds (what feels like hours in the theatrical experience) are the reverse shot of a base shot that’s been building all movie long. We see vistas of topographic beauty and horror, and then we wait for the camera to turn on its pivot and observe how the skin of the body can be ravaged, but the exteriority of the face will always hold us away from the psyche. McQueen understands the barrier and pushes us right up to it.

There will likely come a time in three months when someone calls 12 Years a Slave that nasty, postscriptive phrase “Oscar-bait.” They might compare it to Lincoln or Amistad, an epic tale of sweeping proportions, and implicitly dismiss it on the grounds of size and scope and subject matter. That would be to overlook Solomon Northup.

With 12 Years a Slave, McQueen, Ridley and Ejiofor have collaborated to tell one person’s story, not speak on behalf of a race or a nation. Now, audiences could (and probably should) extrapolate from Northup’s story and they can choose how far, but bearing in mind this is not retelling of history with a capital H, but a diary of the terrible abuses humans inflict on each other and all that can be mined from pain.

It’s a reminder that the quickest route to the place where the gut and the heart reside together is not paved by cinematizing a history book, but rather by telling a story.

Chance Solem-Pfeifer is Hear Nebraska’s staff writer. He’s had to tell his mom twice now that, no, he doesn’t mean that Steve McQueen. Reach him at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.