12/19/2023 0 Comments 2 years a slave edwin epps role![]() ![]() Paul Giamatti is whip-smart as the keen-eyed slave dealer who delights in showing off prize physiques. The white actors embody their characters with urgent authenticity. The film is filled with searing portraits – including a gallery of tragic women, like the elegant Eliza (Adeparo Oduye), who gives in to despair, or the petite yet mighty Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), queen of the field, who picks over 500 pounds of cotton a day but gets caught in the sexual whirlpool of her master’s lust and his wife’s jealousy. Solomon knows there’s no hope for him to regain his former life unless he can pull through this one, even if it means courting favor with vicious owners. When he’s forced to commit acts of cruelty, the moviemakers are wise enough not to condemn him. He learns when he can challenge a white man, and when he must lower his head and accept his place. He’s resourceful and loving, but also realistic and stoic. For most of the movie, he hides his literacy and answers to the name of “Platt,” a runaway from Georgia.Įjiofor establishes his character so surely that audiences always see his true self in his eyes. ![]() They beat him savagely until he stops proclaiming himself a free man from New York. Solomon’s captors immediately seek to destroy his identity. He gives a heroic performance in an extraordinarily difficult role. Ejiofor is their full-fledged collaborator. They present atrocities without exploitation and salvation without sentimentality. The filmmakers exhibit remarkable moral and aesthetic poise. Whether you’re rushing with him through the bayou – he considers escape until he runs into a double lynching – or being roused with him and a dozen others late at night to play and dance for a bored master’s amusement, you feel part of his world. The movie compresses a dozen years of Solomon’s torment into a transfixing account of a sensitive, intelligent man attempting to survive the unremitting abuse and anguish of slave life. ![]() He spends a dozen years as a field hand, carpenter, fiddler, and messenger or delivery boy – always working under the whips and whims of arbitrary, unreliable or sadistic masters. There he is drugged, chained up in a slave pen, transported to a market in New Orleans, and sold to the owner of a bayou plantation. When they flash back to his happy days in Saratoga, the simple sights of him caressing his wife, putting his kids to bed, fiddling gaily for a dance or walking through the town en famille sting with the sweet air of freedom.īased on the 1853 memoir Northup wrote with David Wilson, the movie mostly tells his story straight, from the moment he’s conned by two white entertainers who lure him to Washington, D.C., with the promise of some lucrative gigs. It’s as if the filmmakers and their lead actor are making a covenant with the audience – they vow to flesh out a form of human bondage that encompasses a man’s entirety, from his intellect to his sexuality. In two startling opening vignettes, they depict him struggling in secret to whittle and wield a pen, and succumbing to the sexual touch of a beauty lying next to him in slave quarters. Director Steve McQueen, screenwriter John Ridley and their star, Chiwetel Ejiofor, forge an instant intimacy between the audience and Solomon Northup, a violinist and jack of all trades from Saratoga, N.Y.,, reduced to cutting cane and picking cotton under the lash in Louisiana. This epic of a free black man kidnapped and sold into slavery bristles with texture and feeling – you experience his tortures and hopes vividly and immediately, as if the filmmakers had discovered a kind of 3D IMAX that expands your heart and brain rather than the screen. ![]()
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