There. Now you have an infatuation with her and her perfect face too.
So I was thrilled when she won for Best Supporting Actress and her speech was beautiful, really, the best of the night.
But last night I finally watched the movie, and I back up my assertion that it deserved to win. This is an important movie in what it makes you feel. That is, slightly sick to your stomach, most of the time. Film should be affecting, like this. 12 Years is -- incredibly affecting. So much so that I don't think I ever really need, or want, to watch it again.
There were certainly parts that were hard to watch, but they should be. This is a movie that needs to be difficult to watch in order to be worth anything at all. I'm not going to do a full-fledged review, but I want to talk about my experience with it.
After being completely drained by the graphic whipping scene, there's a short scene in which Solomon destroys his violin, letting the wooden splinters fall to the ground at his feet. And I don't know -- I just started crying. Sobbing, actually.
The tears returned at the end, but in a far more pleasant way, when Solomon is finally reunited with his family.
12 Years leaves unsettled feelings in your stomach and thoughts in your head for days after it's ended. It will really get you to think -- the ultimate goal of art, of storytelling, right? And what I've thought is this:
The film did a fine job of portraying the extent to which slaves were truly not viewed as real people -- the entire reason why slavery could and can ever happen in the first place. This is clear in of course the scenes of abuse, and of buying and selling slaves in an open-house-like setting (complete with refreshments and live music), but was most striking to me in one single line. Toward the beginning of the movie a woman is separated from her two children and arrives at the plantation she was sold to. The planter's wife sees her crying and says something along the lines of, "Your children will be forgotten soon enough." Slaves simply weren't humans to their masters -- not intellectually, not emotionally, not in any way fully human.
However, the one thing I think could have taken this film to a whole new level is in the portrayal of the slave owners. This is a problem that plagues a lot of slavery films. There are virtually only two types of slave owners that are shown: the kind, benevolent, gentle man -- and the sadistic, maniacal, evil man. Benedict Cumberbatch's role was type A and Michael Fassbender's was the epitome of type B. Type A is problematic in that -- hey, these men still owned slaves. He can be as kind as imaginable, but there's still the fundamental problem that he doesn't see slaves, and by extension an entire race of people, as human. He may not wield a whip but he is still racist and that should be shown.
Type B is more problematic though in that it doesn't allow the issue of slavery to be viewed as what it was -- humans being unfathomably cruel to other humans, instead simplifying it into good versus evil. The slaves are shown to be completely human -- we understand and empathize with the victims. But we're missing that other piece, the piece we don't really want to think about: slave owners weren't evil villains, but real people as well. Depicting that could have made 12 Years even more disturbingly realistic.
I'm not asking to be shown a sympathetic character mercilessly beating innocent people, but I am asking to be shown evidence of that character's humanity -- that's, after all, what makes slavery so tragic. We are the only ones to blame.
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