{"id":12515,"date":"2014-02-16T20:29:38","date_gmt":"2014-02-16T10:29:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=12515"},"modified":"2014-05-03T19:03:14","modified_gmt":"2014-05-03T09:03:14","slug":"twelve-years-a-slave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=12515","title":{"rendered":"Twelve Years A Slave"},"content":{"rendered":"

Twelve Years A Slave<\/em> is an adaptation of the memoirs of Solomon Norfolk, a free black man who lives in New York in 1841.\u00a0 Solomon (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) is educated, has a wife and two kids and is skilled at carpentry and the fiddle.<\/p>\n

One day, he takes on some freelance work in Washington D.C offered by two strangers who invite him to spend a fortnight with a travelling circus.\u00a0 Once in D.C, the strangers drug Solomon over dinner and sell him into slavery.\u00a0 He wakes up in chains, is given the identity of “Platt”, a runaway slave from Alabama, and is sold off to the highest bidder.<\/p>\n

The rest of the film spans the brutal twelve years of slavery than Solomon endures.\u00a0 He is sold to two different owners and experiences unimaginable physical and emotional hardship.<\/p>\n

His first master is a planatation owner named Ford (played by Benedict Cumberbatch).\u00a0 Compared to most slave owners, Ford is relatively benign and treats his slaves without cruelty.\u00a0 He outsources the harsh treatment to his foreman Tibeats.\u00a0 Although Ford doesn’t exhibit the worst kind of behavior we’ll see in the film, he is perhaps one of the most aggrevating people to the viewer because of how appallingly complicit he and his wife are to slave culture.\u00a0 His wife’s attempt at consoling a distraught mother who has been seperated from her children is to tell them that “she’ll soon forget them anyway”.\u00a0 Ford quickly recognizes Solomon’s talents as an engineer but when Tibeats becomes enraged at this favourable treatment, Ford spares Solomon from death but ignores his pleas to return him to New York.\u00a0 Ultimately, he does enough to assuage his own guilt but will not act to free Solomon.<\/p>\n

\"12years2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Solomon is sold on to the psychotic Edwin Epps (played by Michael Fassbender) and his vindictive wife Mary Epps.\u00a0 Epps thrives on breaking the will of his slaves and has the poorest workers in the cotton fields flogged on a daily basis.\u00a0 He becomes attracted to his hardest worker Patsey which he is unable to hide from his wife.\u00a0 If there is one thing worse than being a man sold into slavery, it is the life of the slave women.\u00a0 As the unwanted thorn in the marriage of Edwin and Mary, Patsey becomes the target of both their malice and brutality.\u00a0 The endless cycle of abuse that Patsey endures accounts for the most heartbreaking moments in the film.<\/p>\n

Twelves Years A Slave<\/em> is a difficult film to watch, yet it handles its challenging subject matter with a deft hand, never exploiting its violence for melodrama.\u00a0 There are moments of quiet reflection from both the slaves and their masters that also provide some valuable insight into how people coped with and normalized the culture of slavery.<\/p>\n

Some of the slaves despair at the hopelessness of their plight and willfully rebel against their masters, hoping to impose a quicker death upon themselves.\u00a0 Many contemplate suicide.\u00a0 Others, such as Solomon, try everything they can to escape – reasoning with their masters or plotting an escape.<\/p>\n

\"12years3\"<\/a>
\nWe see some of the women try to minimize the harm that come to them by sleeping with foremen or plantations owners to gain favourable treatment.\u00a0 Meanwhile, the children in the cotton fields simply become desensitized to the violence over time.\u00a0 There is an incredible scene in which Solomon is hung by a noose and left to strangle to death in a paddock.\u00a0 In the background, some children run around playing together, oblivious to his situation.<\/p>\n

Even the nature of Solomon’s eventual escape shows how curious the laws of slavery were and how they operated in Nineteenth Century America.\u00a0 Solomon finds a sympathetic ear from a contract labourer named Bass.\u00a0 Even though Bass would eventually help liberate Solomon, the slave culture and treatment of black people is so entrenched that Bass still refers to Solomon as a nigger.<\/p>\n

Stranger still, when Bass is able to verify Solomon’s papers that prove his freedom, a local sheriff visits Epps’ plantation and after a quick line of questioning that validates Solomon’s story, he is immediately granted his freedom, despite the protestations of Epps.\u00a0 It is as though slavery is all good and well but the authorities act with even greater vigour and determination when there’s the horrifying prospect of a beaurocratic oversight with ‘freedom papers’.<\/p>\n

Director Steve McQueen has already made two fine feature length films (Hunger<\/em> and Shame<\/em>) but this is arguably his best work to date.\u00a0 Twelve Years A Slave<\/em> is shot beautifully, has exceptionally strong performances from its cast and addresses a subject matter that American film makers have rarely ventured into.\u00a0 The centrepiece of the film is Chiwetel Ejiofor’s fine performance which calls on him to be brave, to despair, to grovel, to beg, to fight back and to weep.\u00a0 In every scene he exudes the right amounts of fear, vulnerability and guile.\u00a0 He is never anything less than completely convincing.<\/p>\n

Twelve Years A Slave<\/em> is an emotionally taxing and gut wrenching tale of one man out of millions of enslaved people during an awful period in American history.\u00a0 Despite the horrific nature of the story he is still ultimately one of the ‘lucky ones’ – the rare few who found their freedom.\u00a0 Considering his memoir which details his harrowing and extraordinary story, how he spent the rest of his days campaigning and doing work for the rights of African Americans, its strange to think that Solomon Norfolk is not a household name in a country that is so good at lionizing their civil rights leaders.\u00a0 It’d be an admirable legacy to Steve McQueen’s film if it could help start to change that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Starring Brad Pitt<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":12516,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[1768,1767,1258,1766],"class_list":["post-12515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-films","tag-benedict-cumberbatch","tag-chiwetel-ejiofor","tag-michael-fassbender","tag-twelve-years-a-slave"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12515"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14083,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12515\/revisions\/14083"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}