12 Years a Slave (film)
12 Years a Slave is a 2013 biographical drama film directed by Steve McQueen from a screenplay by John Ridley, based on the 1853 slave memoir Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup, an African American man who was kidnapped in Washington, D.C. by two conmen in 1841 and sold into slavery. He was put to work on plantations in the state of Louisiana for 12 years before being released. The first scholarly edition of David Wilson's version of Northup's story was co-edited in 1968 by Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon.[7]
12 Years a Slave
- Brad Pitt
- Dede Gardner
- Jeremy Kleiner
- Bill Pohlad
- Steve McQueen
- Arnon Milchan
- Anthony Katagas
- Fox Searchlight Pictures (United States and Canada)[1]
- Entertainment One (United Kingdom)[2]
- Summit Entertainment (International)[3][2]
- August 30, 2013Telluride Film Festival) (
- November 8, 2013 (United States)
- January 10, 2014 (United Kingdom)
134 minutes[4]
English
$187.7 million[5]
Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Solomon Northup. Supporting roles are portrayed by Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, Garret Dillahunt, Paul Giamatti, Scoot McNairy, Lupita Nyong'o, Adepero Oduye, Sarah Paulson, Brad Pitt, Michael Kenneth Williams, and Alfre Woodard. Principal photography took place in New Orleans, Louisiana, from June 27 to August 13, 2012. The locations used were four historic antebellum plantations: Felicity, Bocage, Destrehan, and Magnolia. Of the four, Magnolia is nearest to the actual plantation where Northup was held.
12 Years a Slave received widespread critical acclaim and was named the best film of 2013 by several media outlets and critics, and it earned over $187 million on a production budget of $22 million. The film received nine Academy Award nominations, winning for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay for Ridley, and Best Supporting Actress for Nyong'o. The Best Picture win made McQueen the first black British producer to ever receive the award and the first black British director of a Best Picture winner.[8][9] The film was awarded the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama, and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts recognized it with the BAFTA Awards for Best Film and Best Actor for Ejiofor.[10] Since its release, the film has been cited as among the best of the 2010s and of all time, with it being named the 44th greatest film since 2000 in a BBC poll of 177 critics in 2016.[11][12]
In 2023, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant," making it the ninth film designated in its first year of eligibility, the 49th Best Picture Academy Award winner and the most recently released film to be selected.[13]
Historical accuracy[edit]
African-American history and culture scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. was a consultant on the film.[16] Researcher David Fiske, a co-author of Solomon Northup: The Complete Story of the Author of Twelve Years a Slave, provided some material used to market the film.[17][18]
Emily West, an associate professor of history at the University of Reading who specializes in the history of slavery in the U.S., said she had "never seen a film represent slavery so accurately".[19] Reviewing the film for History Extra, the website of BBC History Magazine, she wrote: "The film starkly and powerfully unveiled the sights and sounds of enslavement – from slaves picking cotton as they sang in the fields, to the crack of the lash down people's backs. We also heard a lot about the ideology behind enslavement. Masters such as William Ford and Edwin Epps, although very different characters, both used an interpretation of Christianity to justify their ownership of slaves. They believed the Bible sanctioned slavery, and that it was their 'Christian duty' to preach the scriptures to their slaves."[19]
Scott Feinberg wrote in The Hollywood Reporter about a September 22 article in The New York Times that "dredged up and highlighted a 1985 essay by another scholar, James Olney, that questioned the 'literal truth' of specific incidents in Northup's account and suggested that David Wilson, the white amanuensis to whom Northup had dictated his story, had taken the liberty of sprucing it up to make it even more effective at rallying public opinion against slavery."[20][21] Olney had observed that "slave autobiographies, when read one next to another, display an "overwhelming sameness." That is, though the autobiography by definition suggests a unique and personal story, that slave narratives present a genre of autobiographies that tell essentially the same story. When read in conjunction, as in this anthology, there is a distinct repetitiveness. While this repetitiveness disallows the creativity and shaping of one's personal story, as Olney argues, it was equally important for slave narratives to follow a form that corroborated with the stories of others to create a collective picture of slavery as it then existed. In fact, the "same" form presented in all of these unique and individual stories created a powerful and resounding message of the consistent evils of slavery and the necessity of its demise.[22]
A journal article published by The Johns Hopkins University Press and written by Sam Worley states that "Northup's narrative, though well known, has often been treated as a narrative of the second rank, albeit one with an unusually exciting and involving story as well as, thanks to the research of its modern editors, Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon, one with considerable historical value."[23]
Noah Berlatsky wrote in The Atlantic about a scene in McQueen's adaptation. Shortly after Northup's kidnapping, he is sent on a slave ship. One of the sailors attempts to rape a female slave, but is stopped by a male slave. "The sailor unhesitatingly stabs and kills [the male slave]", he wrote, stating that "this seems unlikely on its face – slaves are valuable, and the sailor is not the owner. And, sure enough, the scene is not in the book." Berlatsky also states, "the sequence is an effort to present nuance and psychological depth – to make the film's depiction of slavery seem more real. But it creates that psychological truth by interpolating an incident that isn't factually true."[24]
The visual blog Information is Beautiful deduced that, while taking creative license into account, the film was 88.1% accurate when compared to real-life events, summarizing: "While there are a touch of dramatic license here and there, the most gut-wrenching scenes really happened".[25]
Forrest Wickman of Slate wrote of Northup's book giving a more favorable account of the author's onetime master, William Ford, than the McQueen film. In Northup's own words, "There never was a more kind, noble, candid, Christian man than William Ford," adding that Ford's circumstances "blinded [Ford] to the inherent wrong at the bottom of the system of Slavery." The movie, however, according to Wickman, "frequently undermines Ford."[26] McQueen undercuts Christianity itself as well, in an effort to update the ethical lessons from Northup's story for the 21st century, by holding the institutions of Christianity up to the light for their ability to justify slavery at the time.[27] Northup was a Christian of his time, writing of his former master being "blinded" by "circumstances"[26] that in retrospect meant a racist acceptance of slavery despite being a Christian, a position untenable to Christians now[28] and to Christian abolitionists of the 19th century but not contradictory to Northup himself. Valerie Elverton Dixon in The Washington Post characterized the Christianity depicted in the movie as "broken".[27]
Reception[edit]
Box office[edit]
12 Years a Slave earned $187.7 million, including $56.7 million in the United States.[5] During its opening limited release in the United States, 12 Years a Slave debuted with a weekend total of $923,715 on 19 screens for a $48,617 per-screen average.[85] The following weekend, the film entered the top ten after expanding to 123 theatres and grossing an additional $2.1 million.[86] It continued to improve into its third weekend, grossing $4.6 million at 410 locations. The film release was expanded to over 1,100 locations on November 8, 2013.[5][87] In 2014, 12 Years a Slave was the 10th-most illegally downloaded movie, with 23.653 million such downloads, according to Variety.[88]
Critical response[edit]
Film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 95% of critics gave the film a positive rating, based on 379 reviews, with an average score of 8.90/10. The site's consensus states, "It's far from comfortable viewing, but 12 Years a Slave's unflinchingly brutal look at American slavery is also brilliant – and quite possibly essential – cinema."[89] Metacritic, another review aggregator, assigned the film a weighted average score of 96 out of 100 based on 57 reviews from mainstream critics, indicating "universal acclaim". It is currently one of the site's highest-rated films, as well as the best-reviewed film of 2013.[90] CinemaScore reported that audiences gave the film an "A" grade.[91]
Richard Corliss of TIME wrote: "McQueen's film is closer in its storytelling particulars to such 1970s exploitation-exposés of slavery as Mandingo and Goodbye, Uncle Tom. Except that McQueen is not a schlockmeister sensationalist but a remorseless artist". Corliss draws parallels with Nazi Germany, saying, "McQueen shows that racism, aside from its barbarous inhumanity, is insanely inefficient. It can be argued that Nazi Germany lost the war both because it diverted so much manpower to the killing of Jews and because it did not exploit the brilliance of Jewish scientists in building smarter weapons. So the slave owners dilute the energy of their slaves by whipping them for sadistic sport and, as Epps does, waking them at night to dance for his wife's cruel pleasure."[92] Gregory Ellwood of HitFix gave the film an "A−" rating, stating, "12 Years is a powerful drama driven by McQueen's bold direction and the finest performance of Chiwetel Ejiofor's career." He continued by praising the performances of Fassbender and Nyong'o, citing Nyong'o as "the film's breakthrough performance [that] may find Nyong'o making her way to the Dolby Theater next March". He also admired the film's "gorgeous" cinematography and the musical score, as "one of Hans Zimmer's more moving scores in some time".[93] Paul MacInnes of The Guardian scored the film five out of five stars, writing, "Stark, visceral and unrelenting, 12 Years a Slave is not just a great film but a necessary one."[94] The Guardian's Andrew Pulver said, in 2017, that 12 Years a Slave is "one of the most important films about the African-American experience ever".[95]
Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly praised it as "a new movie landmark of cruelty and transcendence" and as "a movie about a life that gets taken away, and that's why it lets us touch what life is". He also commented very positively about Ejiofor's performance, while further stating, "12 Years a Slave lets us stare at the primal sin of America with open eyes, and at moments it is hard to watch, yet it's a movie of such humanity and grace that at every moment, you feel you're seeing something essential. It is Chiwetel Ejiofor's extraordinary performance that holds the movie together, and that allows us to watch it without blinking. He plays Solomon with a powerful inner strength, yet he never soft-pedals the silent nightmare that is Solomon's daily existence."[96] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, gave the film a four-star rating and said: "you won't be able to tuck this powder keg in the corner of your mind and forget it. What we have here is a blistering, brilliant, straight-up classic." He later named the film the best movie of 2013.[97]