Seeping through an otherwise general consensus of acclaim is how director Steve McQueen had made 12 Years a Slave, an adaptation of Solomon Northup’s 1853 slavery memoir, too “Steve McQueen”:
Northup’s fact-based journey as a free black man from Saratoga, New
York who is kidnapped and sold to various Louisiana plantations, is too
lush and calibrated, showcasing the sensibilities of the art gallery
personality behind it. Mark Harris
writes that McQueen is a “Kubrickian control freak,” whose “camera
never catches anything by accident; he doesn’t leave room for surprise.”
Adam Nayman
argues that some of the film’s disturbing images are displays of
McQueen’s “artistic exhibitionism…[conflating] the agony of the
character with the bravery of the man unflinching enough to put it
onscreen.” Dana Stevens calls McQueen out on “lily gilding” when the story requires “minimal directorial underlying.” And on his podcast, author Bret Easton Ellis sees 12 Years a Slave as
“over-calculated as it is powerful,” the “rigorous formalism” resulting
in an important film that nevertheless feels “rigged.”
But the overt aestheticism befits a film where artisanship is a
motif: with music (instrumentation, dancing, singing), doll-making,
writing, and carpentry, McQueen observes how craftsmanship functions in
an environment engendering creativity vs. a lifeless, inhumane mass
production machine of automatic protocol, where the artisan is denied an
identity and applause. When Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) carves the names
of his wife and two children on the fiddle his first owner, William
Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), has gifted him for his engineering
ingenuity, procreative lifelines and artistic livelihoods converge. But
with lifelines broken and personal expression muted, what’s the point of
creating? Or existing? (The same question is essential to the Coen
brothers’ latest, Inside Llewyn Davis). At his lowest ebb, when
Solomon has nearly surrendered to the given persona of an illiterate
slave named “Platt,” he destroys his instrument.
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