Movie review by Greg Carlson

For any number of reasons, including the ones framed by Richard Brody in his New Yorker essay “Should a Film Try to Depict Slavery?,” fictional and fictionalized movies about the topic are relatively few in number. David Denby’s claim that Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” is “easily the greatest feature film made about American slavery” maybe suggests as much about the smallish category and our collective attitude and appetite for slavery movies as it does about the director’s achievement. While this is not to say that McQueen comes up short in any significant way, “12 Years a Slave” should be considered a thread in an ongoing conversation and not the final word.

Based on Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir “Twelve Years a Slave,” McQueen’s version was preceded by the Gordon Parks adaptation “Solomon Northup’s Odyssey,” which debuted on PBS in 1984. Northup, a free black man from Saratoga Springs, New York, was kidnapped in Washington, D.C. in 1841 and then sold to a series of slaveholders. Working from John Ridley’s episodic screenplay, McQueen does not intend Northup to morph into a synecdochic representative of all slaves, but there are instances in which the character, in relation to all victims of American slavery, becomes, to use Kenneth Burke’s conceptualization, “part of the whole, whole for the part, container for the contained, sign for the thing signified, material for the thing made.”

The new version of Northup’s story, anchored by Chiwetel Ejiofor’s tremendous performance, also features recognizable faces like Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt, Paul Giamatti, Alfre Woodard, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Paul Dano in parts of various size. Aside from Ejiofor, the largely unknown Kenyan filmmaker and performer Lupita Nyong’o leaves the deepest impression as the tragic, victimized slave Patsey. Unencumbered by the reflexive associations that accompany the better-known actors, Nyong’o’s relative anonymity establishes Patsey as a tabula rasa, adding many surprises to the young woman whose superhuman abilities in the fields cannot protect her from rape and the lash.

With “12 Years a Slave,” McQueen continues a gradual move away from the lower-budget austerity of feature debut “Hunger” and follow-up “Shame” to arrive at a recognizably traditional “Hollywood” filmmaking style marked by polished production and sound design, smooth camera glides, and Hans Zimmer’s score. Both Melissa Anderson and Ed Gonzalez recognize McQueen’s continued interest in the physical and psychological contours of the human body, and while neither Anderson nor Gonzalez ultimately share the positivity of the critical majority, the carefully considered pieces they wrote provide much food for thought.

Aside from the score, on multiple occasions the use of music in the movie furnishes the most evocative complement to the gallery of visual horrors visited by McQueen. Ann Powers identifies the way in which two particular songs, the grisly “Run…” and the spiritual “Roll Jordan Roll,” work in tandem to illuminate the film with period detail and comment potently on two facets of antebellum music culture. The scenes featuring these songs are memorable, and the one in which Northup adds his voice – first tentatively and then in full throat – to a funeral chorus is a stirring moment almost stupefying in its intermixture of hope, resignation, acceptance, and despair.