12 Years a Slave has been getting great reviews almost across the board, but it has also inspired some excellent writing outside the standard review format as well. Just in the past couple of days we’ve had two good ones at Movie Mezzanine, but a couple of other write ups really caught my eye today.
Wesley Morris’ write up over at Grantland and he digs into the film’s cultural relevance as eloquently as one would expect from the writer. It’s when he address the most common held complaint levied against the film, its blunt depiction of slavery, that his piece really resonates:
“12 Years a Slave is an easy landmark. It’s a rare sugarless movie about racial inequality. McQueen doesn’t even give you any orchestral elevation. …The movie is about Northup, and at several points an audience is free to remember that most movies about the Civil War and slavery have been appeals to our higher, nobler selves. They’ve been appeals to white audiences by white characters talking to other white characters about the inherent injustice of oppressing black people at any moment in this planet’s history.”
Morris goes on to list a number of films that fit the white perspective he mentions above, there are many, and in two sentences shows why 12 Years a Salve is so important:
“McQueen and Ridley turn that dynamic inside out. Their movie presents the privilege of whiteness, the systematic abuse of its powers, and black people’s struggles to get out from beneath it.”
A great read from Morris (besides the Miley comparisons to Epps), supporters and detractors of the film should not miss it.
Addressing similar issues over at Film.com is Vadim Rizov who goes to bat defending the brutality of the film. I am in the camp that focusing on that brief brutality of the film would be better spent sharing how accessible the film’s subject matter actually is, but Rizov makes a good case none the less. The violence in this film is necessary and Rizov goes after the film’s detractors who attack McQueen for objectifying said violence for art:
“If the charge is that McQueen has made history serve his own peculiar fixation, defanging it into an art project, that seems unfair: engagement with the specific subject at hand isn’t precluded by internal consistency.
I’m left to finally wonder whether McQueen’s crime wasn’t simply to keep his visual cool; the only viable alternative, it seems, would be to make a film that looks conspicuously terrible or to not make it at all.”
Both Morris and Rizov’s pieces deserve your attention and I can’t imagine this will be the last we hear about this fantastic, challenging film.
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One thought on “Critic Speak: Critics Defend Against the Backlash of 12 Years a Slave”
Morris’ piece was absolutely outstanding, thanks for pointing others to it.