It will be impossible to ever look at “Gone With the Wind’’ the same way after “12 Years a Slave,’’ a brutally powerful and emotionally devastating film that takes great pains to rip any lingering vestiges of romanticism from America’s most shameful institution.
You might be able to shrug off even the lurid depiction of slavery in “Django Unchained’’ to some extent as a cartoonish Tarantino fantasy. But “12 Years’’ does not flinch from showing the most horrifyingly graphic details of Solomon Northup’s struggle to survive in a hellish pre-Civil War Louisiana, which he documented in a remarkable memoir.
Chiwetel Ejiofor is unforgettable as Northup, whose journey is especially compelling because he begins it in 1841 as a free black man in Saratoga, NY, a talented violinist and respected member of the community.
Tricked into traveling to Washington, DC, for a supposed job, Northup awakens from a night of drinking chained up in a filthy cell, where he has been stripped of his free papers, dignity and even his name before being shipped to New Orleans to be sold into slavery.
After a series of brutal beatings, it becomes apparent to Northup that the only prayer he has of surviving — let alone ever seeing his wife and children again — is by hiding his past life, especially the fact that he can write and read.
Northup’s very education is a threat to the pernicious institution of slavery, which has never been depicted with such unflinching ugliness in an American movie.
Director Steve McQueen ( the British director of “Shame’) and screenwriter John Ridley spell out in unsparing detail exactly how plantation owners and overseers brutally maintained control over the slaves — legally considered property and not people in the South — who greatly outnumbered them.
At one point Northup is disciplined by being strung up in a noose from a tree for hours, his feet barely touching the muddy ground, while plantation life goes on around him.
This unsettling sequence occurs under the watch of one of Northup’ s more enlightened owners, played by Benedict Cumberbatch.
Things get far worse when Cumberbatch is obliged to sell Northup to the sadistic Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), who thinks nothing of rousing his exhausted field hands in the middle of the night so they can dance for his entertainment while accompanied by Northrup on the violin.
Northup finds himself caught up in the middle of Epps’ ugly sexual exploitation of his top cotton-picker, Patsey (a superb Lupita Nyong’o), who pleads with Northup to end her life. Instead, Northup is forced at gunpoint to whip Patsey nearly to death in a lengthy, graphic and shocking scene that many audience members will be watching through their fingers.
There are many striking moments (photographed by Sean Bobbit) and outstanding performances in this movie. Among the latter are Sarah Paulson as Epps’ vengefully jealous wife; Adepero Oduye as a slave who howls with grief after being torn from her children; Paul Dano as an especially cruel overseer; and Alfre Woodard as a former slave married to a plantation owner (Bryan Batt) who briefly rents Northup.
There is also what amounts to an extended cameo by co-producer Brad Pitt as an itinerant carpenter from Canada who fruitlessly lectures Epps on the evils of slavery (the only preaching in a movie that makes its points far more tellingly by showing them).
More important, Pitt’s character, a deus ex machina based on an actual person, enables a cathartic happy ending — at least for Northup and his family. The expression on Northup’s face conveys what would take reams of dialogue — capping a tour de force by Ejiofor, a British actor best known in this country for the film version of “Kinky Boots.’’
Unavoidably melodramatic and extremely violent at times because of its fidelity to Northup’s life, this film can certainly be difficult to watch. But I’d argue it’s absolutely essential viewing to understand the roots of the tortured history of race relations in this country.
Well-meaning films like “Lincoln’’ and “Lee Daniels’ The Butler’’ merely scratch the surface compared to the deep and painful truths laid bare by “12 Years a Slave.’’ It’s about time, Scarlett O’Hara.