Suffering as spectacle

Solomon Northup was an educated husband and father, a talented violinist and a free man in his early 30s when, in 1841, he lured from Saratoga, New York to Washington, was kidnapped, sold into slavery, shuttled down to New Orleans and is thereafter brutalized, humiliated and forced to work. Not only did he lose every vestige of the life he knew, he was coerced into denying his identity. 12 Years a Slave, adapted by John Ridley from Northup’s bestselling memoir and directed by British gallery artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen, appropriately depicts the beginnings of Northup’s journey as a nightmare: he is misled and drugged; he wakes in shackles; he’s informed that he isn’t who he knows himself to be but rather a runaway from Georgia; he’s viciously beaten for no coherent reason. From this point the film becomes a sort of perversion of the picaresque, with Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) being moved from one plantation to the next, at one point indentured to a benevolent master (Benedict Cumberbatch), at another to an alcoholic sadist (Michael Fassbender), never knowing if salvation may suddenly appear out of the blue or forever elude him until he is either worked or beaten to death.

McQueen’s third feature is less formalist than its predecessors. With its somewhat more conventional coverage, litany of star cameos and sweeping Hans Zimmer score, the film, which counts Brad Pitt amongst its producers—and famous bit-players—incorporates the tropes of the Hollywood historical prestige picture, though it does so with more austerity and less sentiment than anything from Steven Spielberg, whose own slavery epic, Amistad (1997), isn’t among the director’s renown works. I came to the 12 Years a Slave with some skepticism. The phony bathos and shameless showmanship of McQueen’s Shame (2011) prompted me to wonder whether or not I really did like Hunger (2008), his debut. In any case, both of those films trade in suffering as spectacle, and in this regard 12 Years a Slave—which features a protracted, painterly, unbroken shot in which Northup dangles from a noose, his toes tapping desperately on the muddy earth that can’t quite relieve him, while his fellow slaves going about their business for fear of meeting the same fate—is hardly a departure. How could it be? The eerie, awful beauty of this shot doesn’t mitigate the moral imperative to make this nadir in Northup’s story as grueling to behold as possible. It’s just that McQueen’s realization draws as much attention to his impeccable craft and cool audacity as it does to its horror.

Whatever my reservations—and whatever yours may be—I hope it’s clear that 12 Years a Slave is about as close to compulsory viewing as any movie can be. The question, raised in some recent essays prompted by the film’s release and immediate acclaim, as to whether atrocities such as slavery or the Holocaust can or should be the subject of movies isn’t very helpful when trying to reckon with the work itself. See the film, struggle with it, admire it, if you will. Remember that Northup’s is just one story among millions. And let’s indeed celebrate the fact that the wonderful Ejiofor has finally found the breakthrough role he’s so long deserved. Given the nature of the material, his performance is one of immense, nuanced restraint. The smartest thing he and McQueen do in bringing Northup’s story to cinematic life is to leave the fathomless emotions largely to the audience. 

                 

Making amendments

It’s tilted Lincoln, which makes it sound like a bio-pic, but this newest Steven Spielberg film, written by Pulitzer-winning playwright Tony Kushner and based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 bestseller Team of Rivals, does something far more interesting and timely than condense a great life into cinematic bullet points. Lincoln dramatizes the build-up in Washington to the end of the Civil War and the House of Representatives’ vote over the 13^th Amendment, which would abolish slavery. So it’s perhaps best to describe this as a political procedural, a portrait of the democratic process during a pivotal moment in American history.

Of course it’s also a portrait of Abraham Lincoln in his final months, played here by Daniel Day-Lewis, the Anglo-Irishman who’s made something of a career of embodying larger than life emblems of American masculinity (see The Last of the Mohicans, Gangs of New York, There Will Be Blood). A refreshing shift away from the terror and bombast of Bill the Butcher of Daniel Plainview, Day-Lewis’ Lincoln is more Peter Fonda than John Huston, gentle in gesture and reedy in voice, prone to unhurried anecdotes, mischievous uncle jokes and deceptively sly parables, the Colombo of presidents, content to play things relaxed and unthreatening, until the moment comes to show a firm hand and a clear, determined vision. Day-Lewis is well complimented by Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln, who swings from near-hysteria to charisma and control, David Strathairn as Secretary of State William Seward, a man charged with realizing and finessing some of Lincoln’s thornier ambitions, and Tommy Lee Jones as Republican congressional leader and outspoken abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, ornery but articulate, formidable in congress, an author of inspired public insults with two old fried eggs for eyes.

Kushner’s taken a wildly complex, multi-character political narrative and given it a shrewd structure, though he could have lost some peripheral threads, such as one involving Lincoln’s eldest son, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and the superfluous denouement. Kushner’s given his characters some wonderfully eloquent jabs and big, obvious speeches that aren’t inordinately showy. He’s also written some absolutely deadly expository dialogue, yet thankfully John Williams, that most ham-fisted of composers, largely refrains from underscoring all of this dialogue with the sort of soaring schmaltz one might be bracing for. Maybe he was following his old pal Spielberg’s lead, since Lincoln generally finds the director working in a pleasingly reserved mode.  He seems to understand that what’s gripping and fascinating about this story requires and rewards our careful attention; to beat us over the head with the gravity of every scene would only distract from the delight of the details.

For all its flaws, Lincoln feels like the important historical epic it strives to be. And while it’s fundamentally an ensemble picture, I can’t really bear any grudges against the film for orbiting around Lincoln, who’s certainly the closest thing here to a genuine hero. But please don’t bear any grudges against me if I confess that I’d love to see the same story told from the perspective of the three stooges—played by John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson and a zesty, porky, moustachioed James Spader— Seward hires to persuade fence-sitting voters by any means (more or less) legally necessary. Such hedonistic hucksters can also hold history’s dice. And they’re a hell of a lot of fun to explore a few months in 1865 America with. 

    

Blood brother

It’s probably most useful to think of Blaxploitation not so much as a genre unto itself but rather as a prism through which the filmmakers can repurpose existing genres. Case in point: Blacula (1972), American International Pictures’ low-budget, shamelessly pandering, Afro-centric spin on Bram Stoker’s classic horror novel and its countless cinematic incarnations. Opening with a scene, set in 1780, in which Prince Mamuwalde (William Marshall), ruler of an unidentified African country, pays a visit to Count Dracula’s Transylvanian castle in search of an ally in his campaign to end the slave trade. Dracula’s hardly inclined to start caring about slaves—after all, the guy routinely feeds on the blood of others and turns them into undead creatures who do his bidding—and opts instead to appropriate Mamuwalde’s extremely attractive wife, Luva (Vonetta McGee), turn the prince into a vampire and imprison him in a coffin. Mamuwalde’s torment subsides only 192 years later, when an interracial (!) gay couple travels from “the Village” to Romania to shop for high-end antiques. They bring the coffin back to the US and soon enough Mamuwalde wakes up, busts out and starts sucking blood. Seemingly nonplussed by the vestiges of two centuries worth of civilization and technological advancement, Mamuwalde wanders some version of Los Angeles, I think it’s meant to be, and eventually meets Tina (also McGee), whom he believes to be the reincarnation of Luva. Mamuwalde seduces Tina, but the interracial crime fighting duo of Dr. Gordon Thomas (Thalmus Rasulala) and Lt. Jack Peters (Ladies and gentlemen, Officer of the Order of Canada, Gordon Pinset) are getting wise to the prince’s neck-chomping ways and threaten to thwart Mamuwalde’s union with his soul mate all over again.

According to the film’s production history, the whole slavery-infused prologue was an afterthought, prompted by Marshall’s demands that his character seem more dignified. Indeed, little else in Blacula seems to possess much in way of overt or in any case coherent political commentary, even on the level of what might be deemed sheer Black Power propaganda. And the film certainly doesn’t shy away from using its crudely stereotyped gay characters for cheap laughs; Pinsent’s best/worst line, upon learning of the disappearance of the corpse of Mamuwalde’s first victim: “Who the hell would want a dead faggot?” Being an AIP exploitation film, the production values are, ahem, not high. There are continuity errors so flagrant as to seem avant-garde, and the entire film is bizarrely over-lit considering the fact that it’s central character is, you know, a vampire.

But there are reasons to see Blacula beyond the ironic chuckles or time-capsule value: a terrific opening title sequence; a pleasingly counterintuitive (given the genre) R&B score from Gene Page; an amusing, goofily cocksure supporting character named Skillet (Jitu Cumbuka) who swaggers into a couple of scenes with no apparent purpose other than to make Mamuwalde exit; a surprisingly solid band that plays at the nightclub where Mamuwalde hangs with his new pals; and, most especially, the outfits. Seriously. Pretty much everything McGee wears is a knockout, especially Luva’s African royalty garb or this sexy little getup Tina tops off with this kind of a cappuccino knit skullcap. Not everyone in Blacula seems as thoughtfully dressed, but clearly McGee wasn’t about to be caught dead—or undead—in anything less than a memorable, well-tailored fashion statement.  

   

Ride With the Devil: "...how bad bad luck can be"

Ride With the Devil (1999) was dumped into the marketplace over a decade ago with only the most meager fanfare, a magisterial Civil War epic featuring several young rising stars that was somehow immediately rendered little more than a footnote of strictly cult interest in the careers of director Ang Lee and screenwriter James Schamus. All this despite the fact that this celebrated collaborative team had previously enjoyed enormous acclaim with Sense and Sensibility (95) and The Ice Storm (97), and would soon enjoy massive commercial success with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (00). After hearing it praised every couple of years or so by the few people I knew who’d managed to see it, I finally experienced Ride With the Devil for myself last week, thanks to a fine new release from the Criterion Collection. The film’s neglect now seems even more astonishing to me, given that it is surely the equal of Lee and Schamus’ finest work. It is a rare Hollywood film that embraces both a broad canvas and rigorously iconoclastic approach to one of the great troubled subjects of US history. Photographed by Frederick Elmes, it’s beautiful in its bucolic visions yet largely eschews gloss and doesn’t linger unduly on the prettiness of its stars. Based on the novel Woe to Live On, by Daniel Woodrell, it holds moments of tenderness of an endearingly awkward sort, yet most of its key scenes revolve around acts of rampant savagery that recall the most brutal evocations of Cormac McCarthy. It is, of course, a western of sorts.

It begins, shrewdly enough, with a wedding, the calm before the storm. It initially seemed to me burdened with too much overtly ominous and exposition-laden dialogue, but this passage is brief, and after we’re settled in our seats we’re quickly shaken out of them once the central characters’ lives are swept up in their nation’s apocalyptic crisis. We meet two friends, Missouri boys who unthinkingly side with the secessionists, Jake “Dutchy” Roedel (Tobey Maguire), the teenage son of a German immigrant, and Jack Bull Charles (Skeet Ulrich), who’s a little older and at times needs to look after the less experienced Jake. Their friendship is mirrored by that of the aristocratic George Clyde (Simon Baker) and former slave Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright), one of many black men who, for all kinds of reasons best not simplified, fought alongside those who were fighting to keep them enslaved. The story unfolds in such a way that it’s not obvious from the start who our real protagonists will be—Wright doesn’t even speak until 45 minutes in—a little narrative slight-of-hand that pays off brilliantly as we see the merciless vagaries of war wreak havoc on conventional heroic trajectories.

Residing far from the war’s hot points, these guys fight not as enlisted men but as guerillas, a point that serves to emphasize the chaos and meaningless violence that filled the margins of the Civil War’s official campaigns. The guerillas keep their hair long and wear broad-brimmed hats, looking like prototypes for Lynard Skynard. They fight only seasonally, hiding out over the winter, like animals, for fear that the tracks of their horses’ hooves will sabotage their strategies. They’re not organized like a regular army but are every bit as capable of atrocity, something made grotesquely clear in the films’ depeiction of the 1863 Lawrence Massacre, in which the guerillas, some of them already drunk, descend on the Kansas town at dawn, unannounced, to slaughter each and every man they find, sometimes while they lay wounded under the weeping figures of their wives. It’s the major turning point in Ride With the Devil, not in the sense that our central characters become suddenly politically enlightened, but that the infernal inhumanity they bear witness to finally reaches a breaking point. Most of the people being killed, Jake observes, “are just a bunch of ordinary folks finding out just how bad bad luck can be.”

Jake might just be Maguire’s most interesting role, one that invites him to trust in the verity of his inherent, saucer-eyed innocence, rather than trying to comment on the part or ingratiate himself. Though he’s naturally good-humoured, Jake’s learning curve is tremendous and deeply pathetic. It’s a marvelous moment when toward the film’s end he had his haircut and is told by his impromptu barber (Tom Wilkinson) that he looks 21 again. Jake says, “I’m only 19.” His barber tells him, “You’ll never look 19.” There’s an amazing scene soon after that finds the virginal Jake about to make love to a beautiful woman. She repeatedly asks him if he’s ever had sex, but all he can answer, rather defensively, is that he’s killed 15 men. But the most affecting and elegantly wrought piece of acting in Ride With the Devil is easily that of Wright, who never overplays the colossal irony of his role, but uses a little characteristic sway of the head or suspicious glance here and there to make his presence more than felt. Wright’s Holt is a character of vast complexity that needs to be at least partly left to our imagination, though there is a nicely measured scene that makes the core of his journey explicit, one in which he realizes that the most devastating moment in his adult life is also precisely the moment in which he begins to truly feel like a free man. It’s a quiet scene in a film of grand spectacle, yet it constitutes the film’s unforgettable emotional climax.