So yesterday, I finally got around to seeing 12 Years A Slave, the film that's so great you don't even need to see it to give it an Oscar. And....it's not that great. Don't get me wrong - there are some really good things about it. The performances are uniformly fantastic, the sound mixing is perfect - diegetic sounds are amplified and the music is loud and intense, reminiscent of The Excorcist and old fashioned film scores - and it's pretty well shot. But overall...well, first things first.
It starts out very well. It's genuinely affecting when Northup (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, whose name I copied and pasted from IMDb, because fuck trying to spell that) is kidnapped and sold into slavery, and the first hour or so of the film is very well made. The soundtrack is the real star of the film - the combination of amplified diegetic sound and non-diegetic music that is far more intrusive than in most modern films creates a rich atmosphere, enveloping and uncomfortable, like a really humid summer day. The cinematography is great as well - less stark than in Hunger, McQueen's first film, and closer to the opulent textures of Les Miserables. By the looks of this film, directors are finally learning how to make digital look good.
The problem comes about an hour in (I think it was an hour - it's the first quarter of a film that seems about four hours long). Basically, what happens is...nothing. Nothing at all. There's been a fantastic build-up - characters established, horrors of slavery presented in a way that is just realistic enough to be disturbing, but not realistic enough that Guardian readers won't like it - and then it just...keeps going. Northup keeps having a hard time, the slave-owners keep being dicks (as slave-owners tend to do), things keep being generally awful for the slaves, but there's nothing else there. No drama, no tension, no reason to keep watching. Now don;t get me wrong - I love slow cinema. Hunger is a masterpeice, I loved Drive, and The American is one of my favourite films. But this doesn't have the great writing of Hunger, the meditative beauty of Drive or the emotional drive of Papillion, which I think is the best film to compare it to (and not just because it has the other Steve McQueen in it). Like Papillion, 12 Years A Slave is long; like Papillion, there is no defining plot, just story - the actions of characters, as opposed to the problem-solution line of Hollywood; like Papillion, the film focuses around a free man (McQueen is free in spirit; Ejiofor is literally a free man sold into slavery) trying to escape from a brutal situation (a penal colony in the former, slavery in the latter) and the aproach to sound is very similar. Thing is though, in Papillion, there's some substance - I genuinely want Steve McQueen's character to escape, because the film has an emotional efect on me; I want Northup to escape so that the film will be over. 12 Years A Slave is not some slow-burning, brutal masterpeice of the kind that one might expect from the director of the masterful Hunger. Instead, it's dull, self-indulgent, and really not that shocking. There's a flogging scene that's pretty nasty, but compared to what happened to slaves in real life, it seems like a lot of the horrors have been toned down to appeal to the tastes of white liberals.
Basically, watch Papillion - it's much, much better.
No comments:
Post a Comment