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" It&amp;#039;s hard to think of another movie this year that has benefited as much from its timing as 12 Years a Slave. Though it&amp;#039;s impossible that itwas conceived as a response to last year&amp;#039;s Lincoln and Django Unchained, it feels like one, which partly explains the enthusiasm it&amp;#039;s received, including this morning&amp;#039;s lead in the Golden Globe nominations. Lincoln and Django were made by white men who were more proud than sorrowful in their depiction of slave-era America. Steven Spielberg staged a respectful drama about the legal maneuvering that emancipated slaves, and Quentin Tarantino transposed the viciousness of slavery to a spaghetti Western, with a fearsome black hero who literally burned his plantation to the ground. Their movies could be sad and painful, but they were ultimately triumphant testaments to the power of human will and compassion. 12 Years a Slave, as directed by Steve McQueen, is an opportunity for anyone who cheered at those previous films to atone for their sins. There is no winner because everyone is a victim of the inhumanity perpetuated by slavery, which is the movie&amp;#039;s real subject. 12 Years a Slave is being praised as an honest, unflinching, brave, new kind of movie about slavery (to many, the greatest movie about slavery ever made), but in fact it harks back to the oldest form of slave narrative, often told prior to the Civil War to inspire abolitionist sentiment. In this narrative, a slave endures unspeakable tragedy before finally breaking free from his captors. 12 Years a Slave, made by a black man with an eye for artful brutality, serves a similar purpose in our current moment: It gives white people the chance to look back at our own brutishness and shake our heads in disbelief. What&amp;#039;s so brave about that? The most we can ask of any historical film, especially one about an institution as ever-present in the American mind as slavery, is for it to provoke us to understand more deeply what happened. Unfortunately, 12 Years a Slave settles for recreating what happened and numbing us. I was surprised to read in a recent interview with Steve McQueen that he had the idea for a story of a free black man who&amp;#039;s kidnapped into slavery long before the autobiography of Solomon Northup was introduced to him. Likewise, his film puts premise before subject. As I was watching it, I couldn&amp;#039;t help but wonder about the man it was supposed to be about. Is the violin he&amp;#039;s given by one owner a source of solace or despair? Does he ever contemplate suicide like the fellow slave who asks him to kill her out of mercy? How does he get on after finally coming home? 12 Years a Slave raises fascinating questions about the human condition \u2014 what it&amp;#039;s capable of and how it endures \u2014 all of which seem to have been discarded in favor of a more blunt approach. So Northup is a vessel through which to witness the depravities of slavery before returning safely home from them. Students of horror and exploitation cinema will quickly pick up on the movie&amp;#039;s rhythm. McQueen moves from one gruesome set piece to the next, ratcheting up the gore as he goes, until he finally closes in on flesh ripped from a body, the soundtrack shrieking with us. Of course, horror derives its power from real-world atrocities, and there&amp;#039;s nothing wrong with detailing those atrocities. The larger problem is that there is little sense of the humanity at stake. McQueen makes the bizarre choice, as he did in his previous films, to frequently cut away from faces to body parts or the outside world, as if the men and women who suffered slavery were somehow secondary. At one point, the camera lingers over a plant&amp;#039;s gorgeous lacing in a tree as slaves walk past it. The plant has no meaning to any of the characters, at least that we&amp;#039;re aware of, and yet it seems to have been included solely for its beauty among so much carnage. Occasionally we get glimpses of the psychological and spiritual inquiry the movie could and should have been. In one scene, Northup joins his fellow slaves in a song that signals his resignation to his fate. Later, Northup asks a drunk poor white man who&amp;#039;s working with the slaves for help. The white man outs Northup&amp;#039;s escape plan to the master. When you think you&amp;#039;re going to get another shot of Northup being beaten, you instead see how he&amp;#039;s able to turn the hierarchy of the antebellum South in his favor. It&amp;#039;s a sequence that fascinatingly deconstructs the lies that sustained slavery and the courage it took to overcome them. But McQueen&amp;#039;s camera is more eager to get to the sight of black bodies swinging in the breeze. That&amp;#039;s not to say there isn&amp;#039;t power in those images. For anyone ignorant or racist enough to doubt the savagery of what was done to American slaves, 12 Years a Slave is a schooling. But that alone isn&amp;#039;t enough to make the movie brave. A braver modern work, like Toni Morrison&amp;#039;s Beloved or Kara Walker&amp;#039;s stunning retrospective at the Whitney, would&amp;#039;ve pushed past the moment Solomon was freed, past the institution of slavery itself, and asked more pressing questions about the responsibility we still bear, the struggle that still hangs over us. Slavery destroyed bodies, but it did much more. It erased lives and histories. 12 Years a Slave&amp;#039;s one allusion to this comes at the end, in a sly title card informing us that the circumstances and date of Solomon Northup&amp;#039;s death are unknown. Let&amp;#039;s not forget the debt we still owe him. PLUS: Stephen Marche on 12 Years a Slave, racism in pop culture, and an interview with Chiwetel Ejiofor Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a26416/12-years-a-slave-not-brave-enough/>