Steve McQueen's adaptation of Solomon Northup's 1853 memoir. The first film about American slavery to win Best Picture.
Saratoga, New York, 1841. Solomon Northup, a free Black violinist and family man, is approached by two white men who offer him a brief, well-paid engagement in Washington. They drug him and sell him into slavery in Louisiana. The film follows Northup's twelve years in bondage — sold to several owners, including the relatively decent William Ford and the sadistic Edwin Epps — as he tries to keep alive the knowledge of who he was, and the hope of contacting his family in the North.
Northup's actual memoir, published in 1853 after his release, is one of the most-detailed first-hand accounts of American slavery to survive. The film's faithfulness to the source is notable; McQueen's directorial decisions are about what to depict, not what to invent.
12 Years a Slave is structurally a film about endurance. The film's most-discussed sequences — Solomon left hanging by a noose for the better part of a day with the household carrying on routine activities behind him, Patsey's whipping under Epps's order — are deliberately held long past the audience's comfort. McQueen, who had been a video artist before becoming a filmmaker, refuses the standard cinematic move of cutting away from violence at the moment of impact. The audience is asked to watch.
The film's defence of this choice is that previous American films about slavery (Gone with the Wind being the canonical example, but also many of the well-meaning post-1960s attempts) have softened the subject in ways that make it palatable. 12 Years a Slave is the first major studio film to refuse the softening. It is, on first viewing, almost physically difficult to watch. The defenders argue this is the film's moral seriousness; the few critics who pushed back argued that there is a line between depicting suffering and consuming it.
Chiwetel Ejiofor's Solomon Northup is the film's centre. The role requires a performance of containment — Solomon's survival depends on his ability to suppress almost every visible reaction. Ejiofor's eyes carry what his face cannot show. The scene of Solomon singing 'Roll, Jordan, Roll' at a funeral, slowly joining the chorus he has refused to participate in for years, is one of the most-discussed acting moments of the 2010s.
Lupita Nyong'o, in her film debut, plays Patsey, an enslaved woman who is the focus of Epps's obsession and abuse. Nyong'o won Best Supporting Actress on her first nomination. The performance is one of the most-difficult ever given by a debut actor — the role requires Patsey to be witnessed in extended, sustained suffering, and Nyong'o's commitment to the role's physical reality is the film's most-discussed performance.
12 Years a Slave's 2014 Best Picture win was the first time the Academy honoured a film about American slavery with its top prize. Previous Best Picture winners (Gone with the Wind, 1939; Driving Miss Daisy, 1989; Crash, 2005) had either depicted slavery in ways that have not aged, or had handled American racial history with the soft-focus the era and audience expected.
The McQueen win was, in retrospect, an early signal of the structural change in Academy voting that would, six years later, produce Moonlight, Parasite, and (more partially) CODA. The 2010s Best Picture race progressively moved toward films that the 1990s Academy would not have honoured. 12 Years a Slave is the inflection point.