Critics reviews

While I think that [McQueen] has a knack for conceptually interesting, installation-type long takes, I think he's essentially tone-deaf when it comes to performance, and skirts by on casting... Because [the movie] can't organize that sense of catharsis it so badly needs, it just feels as though McQueen is scurrying for an exit.

There's so much artistry in this rich, subtle movie. There's dark humour in Epps' delusions, as when his crops fail and he claims the slaves are responsible ("Don't bring no Biblical plagues on him, y'hear?" he warns, passing them off to another master). There's visual beauty in the shady, humid landscapes, the woods where a slave might stumble across a casual lynching, or a party of Native Americans.

12 Years does not care to showboat; its defining quality is rigour, which it needs to convey real pain. Its formalism is directed at an emotional truth, one that resonates because McQueen is committed to it unflinchingly. This is Solomon Northup's story. But in its conviction and style, this is very much Steve McQueen's film.

To plunge us in the corporeal realities of slavery is precisely McQueen's intention, and it's debatable that an American filmmaker would be so explicit. Moreover, in a contemporary climate where black bodies are still discussed in depressingly evaluative terms... it's not as if 12 Years a Slave is a fusty museum piece; rather, it's an essential addition to an ongoing conversation about the representation of black bodies in the media.

Undeniably, 12 Years a Slave is dramatically compelling, impeccably crafted, and, generally, superbly performed. But much in the way that Solomon Northup's 1853 memoir was engineered to sway the sympathies of its Yankee readership to the abolitionist cause, one suspects the appeal of McQueen and producer-screenwriter John Ridley's adaptation is owed partly to the manner in which it has been custom-built to curry self-congratulatory favour with contemporary viewers.

12 Years a Slave –- an arthouse exploitation gift to masochistic guilty liberals hungry for history lessons, some of whom consider any treatment of American slavery by a black filmmaker to be an unprecedented event, thus overlooking Charles Burnett's far superior Nightjohn.

The director's choreography is so exact that one can imagine a wooden frame around each image, or a proscenium. The effect is akin to a series of moving paintings, or long scenes in an opera or a religious play. The film is pain, transformed into real art, useful art, art that triggers empathy and understanding. It takes Black history, White history and American history out of the past and says, "This is happening right now. To you."

Our idea of what a "slave movie" is or should be gets coupled with our idea of what a "great movie" should be, and that's further coupled with our expectations for what makes a movie Oscar-worthy... Steve McQueen is aware of these assumptions, and part of the power of his film derives from his careful acknowledgment and then undermining of those assumptions. The wonder of 12 Years a Slave is that it is, indeed, fully a movie about slavery, a great movie, and an Oscar-worthy movie.

...I wasn't so much moved when Solomon looks directly into the camera, but somewhat at peace, with nature finally _blurred_ (those disgusting shots of nature rightly ‘beautiful', disgust with the natural order of things), with _Solomon in thought_ looking at our frame since we can see the actors face without what has been appearing in frame. I was already tearing near the end but when Solomon says, "I apologize for my appearance" I cried.

The tableau of Northup's near-hanging torture is a masterpiece of staging, and it calls to mind at once Bruegel the Elder's painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and the lynching postcards of the post-reconstruction South. But unlike Breughel's painting, in which the boy's deadly fall, like most tragedy, takes place virtually unnoticed while the world goes on around it, and unlike the postcards which are more uncanny than horrifying, McQueen puts Northup's human suffering front and center.

Though the director's tonal extremity and emphasis on the tested body bode well for hurling the savagery of antebellum plantation life at the audience, McQueen can't quite escape the lure of a simplified Hollywood narrative, a reality that results in unfortunate soft-peddling, be it in the form of digestible good-bad dichotomies... a barrage of big-name actors, or the distractingly emphatic speaker-busting of Hans Zimmer's orchestra, which by now has a built-in blood-boiling factor.

12 Years' points about the system are its greatest assets. That scene of Solomon hanging has been described as a directorial setpiece that's more about McQueen than Solomon. I vehemently disagree. That scene is society in microcosm, not just the slave society, but ours as well. When that female slave suddenly comes into frame and offers Solomon water at her own risk, it's a marvelous "fuck the system" shout-out. She's like an Ebony Florence Nightingale, a ghost who's gone as quickly as she came.