12 Years a Slave

That's Master John Harrison to you, Platt

Grade: A

Director: Steve McQueen

Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Fassbender, Lupita Nyong'o, Sarah Paulson, Paul Giamatti and Brad Pitt

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 13 min.

12 Years a Slave is going to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Chiwetel Ejiofor is going to win an Oscar for Best Actor. Steve McQueen is probably going to win Best Director. And, Michael Fassbender is going to at least be nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Given Hollywood’s roller coaster history with race, whether those declaratives strike you as meritorious recognition for an extraordinary movie, or a reflexive reaction generated by political correctness and white guilt, is a rather legitimate debate. Except for one select group of people: those who have actually seen the film. For them, the mere bestowing of trophies and trinkets pales in comparison to a motion picture whose story, emotion and, yes, beauty transcends such meager plaudits.

McQueen’s adaptation of Solomon Northup’s eponymous 1853 autobiography is at once both straightforward and layered, unsightly and gorgeous, disheartening and uplifting. It renders the “peculiar institution” of American slavery like few (if any) previous films, particularly as a (perhaps intentional) counterpoint to the ahistorical antics of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Moreover, it augments the obvious horrors of lynchings and the lash with a sobering portrait of the degradation and suffocating desolation that flows out of a financial system built around human enslavement.

Based on a harrowing true story, Solomon, a free black man living in Saratoga Spring, N.Y. in 1841 with his wife and two young children, is lured to Washington, D.C under the pretense of a lucrative gig playing the violin. There, Solomon is drugged, chained, beaten, renamed “Platt,”and shipped south to Louisiana, where the Spanish moss hangs like tears from the very trees used to hang runaways. What follows is a dozen anni of bondage as Solomon works the cane and cotton fields for several masters, some more cruel than others but all complicit.

The film presents immorality both seen and unseen. On one end of the spectrum is Solomon whipping Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), a slave mistress, at the armed direction of their drunken, mad master Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender, repellant and mesmerizing), a scene of minutes that seems like hours, the brutality building to the crescendo of seeing the lash ripping open Patsey’s flesh.

However, equally disconcerting are the evils McQueen leaves to the viewer’s imagination. A slave marketer (Paul Giamatti), declaring that his sentimentality extends no further than the coin, sells children away from their slave mother, boasting that her young mulatto daughter will fetch a pretty penny from certain unsavory buyers. In a single scene, McQueen ticks off several atrocities: rape by slave owners; the dissolution of slave families; and even child sex trafficking.

While the overt cruelty is striking, what sets 12 Years a Slave apart is the deliberate way it immerses the viewer into the oppressive, emotionally numb reality of people stripped of their freedoms, forced to abandon hope in order to survive. Slaves dare not utter their real names or reveal their literacy. In other instances, slaves go about their daily chores as one of their own dangles from a tree branch, or they are awoken in the middle of the night to perform a kind of minstrel show for their master.

Indeed, the film’s true brilliance rests in how it immerses the audience in the hopelessness. You quietly reprove each time Solomon casts an eye toward running into the forest, asks someone to deliver a letter up north to his family or considers revealing his true identity to a stranger, fearful of the retribution that would befall him. Viewers find themselves siding with villains, like the overseer who saves Solomon’s life after he fights a malicious white carpenter (Paul Dano) and “only” punishes him by letting him hang from a noose all day, Solomon’s muddy tiptoes the only thing sparing him from suffocation. And, you gradually share Solomon’s affinity for William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch, typically nuanced), a plantation owner and Baptist preacher (the way biblical scripture was twisted into a justification for slave-owning recurs on several occasions) whose relative kindness masks the obvious fact that he still buys and enslaves other humans like chattel.

In fact, one of the most memorable moments is when mistress Harriet Shaw (Alfre Woodard in a tremendous cameo), practiced in antebellum manners, in one breath recounts both the indignities she’s partaken in order to survive and the eternal damnation awaiting the captor she favors.

At the center of the moral malstrom is Ejiofor, a respected character actor whose astounding performance is both brave and humanizing. Aided by Ejiofor’s valiant interpretation, Solomon is the apt vehicle for conveying these awful truths. The plight of Africans rounded up and shipped from their homeland into servitude is a world far removed from contemporary Western audiences. On the other hand, the freedom Solomon loses is our own, a life of American domestic tranquility that’s stripped away and replaced by a Kafkaesque nightmare. Solomon Northup is the soul of a setting in which there’s precious little to be found.

Django Unchained

Hey, some of my best fashion model girlfriends are black

Grade: B
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington, Samuel L. Jackson and Don Johnson
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 2 hr. 35 min.

By the end of the mostly heady, sometimes punishing experience of watching Django Unchained, you’ll have a strong inkling why both Kurt Russell and Kevin Costner dropped out after agreeing to appear in Quentin Tarantino’s slavery-set revenge flick. Apparently, the potential benefit of allowing the director to work his renowned career-resuscitating magic wasn’t enough to stomach having to repeatedly refer to actors playing slaves as “n**gers” in the middle of a plantation revival setting.

Tarantino has always reveled in being a cinematic iconoclast, but his latest B-movie pastiche promises to polarize casual fans and fanboys alike. Tarantino applies his raw, increasingly garrulous voice to a mashup that notably includes the Western black bounty hunter tableau of the 1975 blaxploitation film Boss N**ger, the bloody violence of Sam Peckinpah and the original Django, a 1966 spaghetti Western starring Franco Nero (who has a bit part in this iteration), and the grotesque depiction of slavery in the American South captured in the 1971 Italian pseudo-documentary Goodbye Uncle Tom, including a version of the film’s butcherous finale.

Set in 1858, “two years before the Civil War,” Django (Jamie Foxx) is a shackled slave rescued from his chain gang by Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a German, Doc Holliday-esque former dentist turned bounty hunter who needs Django to collect the bounty for a trio of ruthless brothers Django can identify. In exchange, Schultz agrees to free Django from “this slavery malarky” and help rescue his wife, the German-fluent Broomhilda (Kerry Washington, who shrieks and quivers a lot). Django takes a liking to bounty hunting—another “flesh-for-cash business,” as Schultz compares it to slavery—and the new partners soon track Broomhilda to the clutches of Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), the debonair but barbarous proprietor of Candyland, a plantation where Candie breeds male slaves for sport fighting.

While Foxx is able, earnest but surprisingly unmemorable, Waltz sinks his teeth into Tarantino’s verbose dialogue, like he did as a Nazi officer in Inglourious Basterds. DiCaprio goes with gusto where Russell and Costner dared not tread, but the supporting cast is highlighted by Samuel L. Jackson’s portrayal of Candyland’s house Negro, whose ceremonial unctuousness masks a malevolence toward anyone would might threaten his master’s house.

Admirers of Tarantino’s audacity, his dexterity with a camera (along with cinematographer Robert Richardson) and his encyclopedic knowledge of cinema will find satisfaction despite a 165-minute running time that could have stood being sheared down a half-hour or so. Structurally, this is one of Tarantino’s most straightforward films. Still, there are a number of glaring plot holes and historical inaccuracies—e.g., the use of dynamite and other weaponry years before they were invented. They’re the sort that routinely crop up in Tarantino’s work and should no longer be waved away as artistic flourish, particularly considering his recent criticism that the 1977 miniseries Roots “oversimplified” slavery and didn’t “ring true.”

Tarantino deserves credit for committing many of slavery’s horrors to film, including bracing scenes of slaves being beaten, eaten by dogs, stripped, smeared with blood, face-branded and pitted in so-called “Mandingo fights.” However, the awful reality of the antebellum South was far, far worse, and Tarantino particularly pulls his historical punches in the depiction of women, limiting himself to allusions of coerced prostitution without the rape and rank sexual abuse that ran rampant in the plantation culture. Apparently even Tarantino knows that unmasking facts must be balanced against public appetites and the MPAA ratings board.

The biggest trouble with Django Unchained isn’t hearing the n-word over 110 times, by some counts. Indeed, such overuse almost acts to neuter the term of its inflammatory function. Instead, while Tarantino claims he wants the film to start a conversation, the real problem is that it doesn’t have very much to say. Setting entertainment amid trying times is nothing new to cinema, but cloaking it with the shroud of truth is Tarantino wanting to have his layer cake and eat it too. It also opens Tarantino up to criticism that he is exploiting slavery’s scourge for pop consumption and self-aggrandizement.

A scene like the metaphorical undressing of the hoods worn by a group of Klansmen is not only overlong, but it’s indicative of the easy, banal chuckles Tarantino deploys throughout Django Unchained under the guise of social satire. It’s small compensation for audiences asked to surrender their racial sensibilities at the theater door.

Lincoln

So, ladies and gentlemen... if I say I'm a rail splitter you will agree. 

Grade: A -
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, David Strathairn, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, James Spader and Hal Holbrook, John Hawks and Tim Blake Nelson
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 2 hr. 29 min.

Steven Spielberg used to make movies you love. He now makes movies you admire. There’s a difference.

Even today, any video montage encapsulating Spielberg’s illustrious filmography includes a Great White champing Roy Scheider’s chum, little Henry Thomas furiously pedaling his bike across the moon, Harrison Ford fleeing a rolling boulder and a T. rex’s dilating pupil. The Catch Me If You Cans and The Terminals garnishing his more recent credits barely seem to register, and the less said about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull the better.

The evolution in Spielberg’s filmmaking is not a matter of competence but rather perspective. It’s notable enough that Lincoln and Munich—both screenplays written by Tony Kushner—are Spielberg’s best films since Saving Private Ryan. What’s intriguing is considering how the Lincoln biopic he delivers today might differ from the one the director of E.T. would have made 30 years ago, or even 11 years ago when DreamWorks first acquired the film rights to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s then-unpublished biography, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.

What might the Spielberg who produced Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., with themes of a distant or absentee father mirroring Spielberg’s longtime estrangement from his own dad, have done with the often tenuous relationships between Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his own sons, including 12-year-old Tad and eldest Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a college student desperate to don a uniform. Or how would the Spielberg who made The Color Purple have chronicled slavery and the plight of blacks during the Civil War? Today, Spielberg has reconciled with his father, and his cinematic idealism has been tempered by age and a better, perhaps bitter understanding of the world.

Lincoln confines itself to the final two chapters of Goodwin’s book, which cover the final effort to pass the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolishing slavery through a lame duck House of Representative during January 1865, shortly after Lincoln’s reelection. Spielberg focuses on the fractured forces both propelling and obstructing passage, using this as a springboard into Lincoln’s moral fortitude, political aptitude and private torments.

As the still-bloody Civil War is winding down, the Confederacy is actually the least of Lincoln’s political predicaments. His resolute commitment to pass the 13th Amendment—and the thorny moral, legal and economic motives behind it—is undercut both factions both inside and outside his Republican party. Even sans any representatives from the seceded states, the amendment’s passage is being blocked by Democrats fiercely opposed to the president. Meanwhile, the conservative wing of the Republican Party, through their spokesman Francis Preston Blair (Hal Holbrook), believe the fight over the amendment will undermine their principal goal of negotiating peace with the Confederacy and ending the four-year war. So-called Radical Republicans, abolitionists led by Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), mistrust Lincoln and believe his cautiousness has inhibited more sweeping societal revolution. Even members of Lincoln’s cabinet fret that the fight to secure passage is a quixotic distraction that jeopardizes the president’s popularity.

What follows is a revealing insight into the horse-trading and skullduggery that’s always been grist for the political mill. Opponents to the amendment blast its supporters with the vilest of invectives, delivering fire-breathing speeches on the House floor that would be branded both anachronistic and melodramatic if Kushner didn’t largely lift them from the official record. In order to achieve their desired outcome, Lincoln and his consigliore, Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn), basically buy votes by doling out patronage to outgoing Democrats and strong-arming those with teetering positions. To do this dirty work, Seward employs a motley, comical trio (James Spader, Tim Blake Nelson and John Hawkes) who essentially act as the 19th century precursors to Nixon’s “plumbers.”

In recent times, two the most beaten Oscar paths are: a) portrayals of historical figures, and b) being Daniel Day-Lewis. Nevertheless, Day-Lewis’ performance here is monumental, wholly capturing both the grandeur and frailties of the man. Abe Lincoln exhibits acute awareness of when a folksy story can be more effective than a soaring stem-winder, and Day-Lewis delivers both with equal aplomb. Moreover, his Lincoln is cloaked in certitude about his convictions, but he’s also battered from battles both professional and personal, including the 1862 death of son Willie, his reluctance to permit Robert to join the army and the tumultuous relationship with his shrewd but haunted wife Mary Todd (Sally Field, more than equal to the task). The measured gait, lissome gestures and reedy voice Day-Lewis adopts are more than historical reproduction. They lift Lincoln off Mount Rushmore and make him mortal, forging an emotional connection with the audience and salvaging Spielberg’s ever-hovering penchant for schmaltzy grandeur. Indeed, composer John Williams’ plaintive trumpet or piano intrudes into more than a few poignant moments: a far bolder and intriguing option would have been to not score the film at all save the opening and closing anthems.

A glimpse of brutal hand-to-hand combat opens the film, but Spielberg never provides a lengthier battle scene that would have illustrated the bloody burden weighing on Lincoln as well as visual context for the conservative Republicans’ peace-first position. And personally, I regret that one of cinema’s greatest auteurs didn’t exercise the opportunity to capture one of American history’s seminal events, Lincoln’s assassination.

But these are quibbles with an otherwise lofty yet remarkably restrained epic. Lincoln accomplishes the seemingly irreconcilable feat of humanizing Abraham Lincoln while preserving his mythology. It’s a portrait—and a man—worthy of being both loved and admired.

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com