Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) can’t believe the turn his life has taken in 12 YEARS A SLAVE
12 YEARS A SLAVE (Steve McQueen, 2013)
Opened October 18
www.12yearsaslave.com
Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is an extraordinary cinematic achievement, an epic historical drama that is as much about contemporary issues of race in America as it is about slavery. Chiwetel Ejiofor gives a staggeringly rich performance as Solomon Northup, a free man in Saratoga Springs in 1841, a successful carpenter and musician and accepted member of society, living with his wife (Kelsey Scott) and two children in a beautiful home. When Brown (Scoot McNairy) and Hamilton (Taran Killam) offer him a temporary job playing the fiddle in a traveling circus, he is tricked and sold into slavery, auctioned off to the highest bidder by a greedy man with no moral base (Paul Giamatti). Renamed Platt, he is soon working on a New Orleans plantation owned by William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), where he is regularly harassed by John Tibeats (Paul Dano), who is responsible for keeping the slaves in line. When Northup and Tibeats’s battle comes to a head, Ford sells Solomon to Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), a far less benevolent slave owner whose wife, Mary (Sarah Paulson), rules him with an iron fist. As Epps grows a fondness for the slave Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), who can pick more cotton than any of the others, Solomon starts thinking of a way out, risking his life to regain his freedom and return to his family.
Michael Fassbender, Lupita Nyong’o, and Chiwetel Ejiofor all received Oscar nods in Steve McQueen’s harrowing historical epic
McQueen’s third film, following Hunger, about IRA member Bobby Sands’s prison hunger strike, and Shame, which dealt with severe sex addiction, 12 Years a Slave is a harrowing experience, a very difficult film to watch. McQueen holds nothing back, including unforgettable scenes of brutal torture and psychological and emotional torment. Every moment is nerve-racking, particularly when Solomon is hanged from a tree for an extended period of time, his toes barely touching the ground to keep him from being strangled to death. Ejiofor (Dirty Pretty Things, Kinky Boots) is mesmerizing as Solomon, able to make viewers share his pain with just a glance; McQueen uses his background as an experimental video artist to make unexpected choices that are powerful and unforgiving. The film features numerous outstanding supporting performances, including the brave Nyong’o as the relentlessly brutalized Patsey, McQueen regular Fassbender as the slave owner who thinks he might love her, and producer Brad Pitt as one of the only white men in the South who seems to really understand what is going on. The film was written by novelist and screenwriter John Ridley (Three Kings, Love Is a Racket), who adapted the story from Northup’s 1853 memoir, imbuing it with a freshness and vitality while subtly drawing parallels to the racism that is still prevalent today. Watching 12 Years a Slave isn’t easy, but if you pass it up, you’ll be missing one of the best, and most important, films of this short century.
Nominated for nine Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director (Steve McQueen), Best Actor (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Best Supporting Actor (Michael Fassbender), Best Supporting Actress (Lupita Nyong’o), Best Adapted Screenplay (John Ridley), Best Film Editing (Joe Walker), Best Production Design (Adam Stockhauser and Alice Baker), and Best Costume Design (Patricia Norris)
It’s tradition versus modernization in Stephen Frears’s re-creation of the Royal Family’s reaction to the death of Princess Diana on August 31, 1997. While the world mourns, Queen Elizabeth II (a stoic Helen Mirren), Prince Philip (an acerbic James Cromwell), and the Queen Mum (Sylvia Syms) just continue their daily routine as if nothing has happened. They take Diana and Prince Charles’s (Alex Jennings) children up to Balmoral to hunt stag, refusing to publicly acknowledge the tragedy. Meanwhile, Tony Blair (Michael Sheen, reprising the role from Frears’s 2003 British television movie THE DEAL) has been swept into the office of prime minister in a landslide victory for forward-thinking change. Noting the public response to Diana’s death, Blair implores the queen to respond, but protocol, pride, and dignity get in the way. Frears cleverly, if obviously, displays the differences between the old and the new in depicting the simple home life of the Blairs against the opulence of the Royal Family, each way of life representing the ever-growing gap in British society. Through exhaustive research, screenwriter Peter Morgan imagines the relationship between Blair and the queen, including numerous private conversations held over the phone and in person, and as intriguing as they are, there’s just no way to know how much of it really happened. (A similar fate befell The Last King of Scotland, in which cowriter Morgan imagined conversations Idi Amin had with a made-up character.) Nominated for six Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay, The Queen is a compelling film, with solid acting (Cromwell is a screaming riot, and Mirren won an Oscar for Best Actress for her stellar performance) and appropriately calm direction, but it never quite reaches the heights it aspires to. The Queen is screening January 18 at 3:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image series “Stephen Frears: The Chameleon,” being held in conjunction with the success of the director’s most recent work, Philomena, which has been nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actress (Dame Judi Dench).
In 2009, thirteen-year-old Laura Dekker announced that she was going to try to become the youngest person to sail around the world solo. After a long battle with the Dutch court, the teen, who was born on a boat in New Zealand and spent her first five years at sea, took off on her journey in her thirty-eight-foot ketch appropriately dubbed Guppy. Laura’s inspiring — and controversial — story is told in the winning documentary Maidentrip. Jillian Schlesinger’s debut feature-length film follows Laura as she circumnavigates the globe by herself, sailing across long stretches of sometimes treacherous ocean and making stops to experience a variety of lands and cultures. The bulk of Maidentrip is told in Laura’s own voice, as she films herself on board Guppy and talks not only about her adventure but also about her personal life, including discussing the effects of her parents’ divorce on her and her sister when she was five. “I love being alone,” Laura says at one point. “And I guess, yeah, I feel like freedom is when you’re not attached to anything.” As serious as she is about sailing, she is still a teenager, dancing in front of the camera playfully and throwing a little hissy fit when a visitor annoys her. It all makes for an intimate coming-of-age story as Laura, who values her privacy, grows up in public. Should her parents, particularly her father, who she chose to live with, have allowed the teen to go on this trip in the first place? Is it the court’s responsibility to intercede in such situations? Schlesinger gets the controversy out of the way early, never again revisiting what many people will consider a wrongheaded and dangerous decision, but they’re likely to change their mind once they watch Laura persevere and flourish at sea. Winner of the Audience Award at the Cannes Film Festival and SXSW, Maidentrip opens January 17 at the IFC Center, with Schlesinger and producer Emily McAllister on hand to talk about the film at the 6:25 and 8:25 screenings on Friday and Saturday night.