12 Years a Slave
Remarkable, isn’t it, that it took a foreign-born filmmaker, with the help of a mostly foreign-born cast, to properly tell the shamefully American tale 12 Years a Slave.
Steve McQueen is the British director who artfully and impeccably translates Solomon Northup’s memoir of illegal captivity to the screen. Northup, played with breathtaking beauty by Chiwetel Ejiofor, was a free family man in New York State, a violinist by trade, duped, drugged, shackled and sold into slavery in Louisiana. We are privy to the next 12 years of this man’s life, and while it is often brutally difficult to watch, it’s also a tale so magnificently told it must not be missed.
Chiwetel Ejiofor is an intense talent, though you have likely never heard of him and have possibly never seen him. But if you happened to have come across Britain’s 2002 thriller Dirty Pretty Things and spied his tender, heart-wrenching turn as Okwe, a Nigerian immigrant fallen into sketchy company in London, you knew he was destined for great things.
He’s found that destiny in 12 Years a Slave.
The clear Oscar frontrunner, Ejiofor is not alone as a favorite this award season. McQueen populates his understated, graceful picture with one of the most perfectly chosen casts in memory. Even the smallest role leaves a scalding impression. Whether it’s Paul Giamatti’s casual evil, Benedict Cumberbatch’s cowardly mercy, Paul Dano’s spineless rage or Adepero Oduye’s unbridled grief, there’s an emotional authenticity to the film that makes every character, no matter how brief their appearance in Northup’s odyssey, memorable – sometimes painfully so.
But there are three performances you will likely never forget. Principally, there is Ejiofor, a performer who expresses more conflict, anguish and thought with his eyes than most actors can hope to share in an entire performance. His work roils with emotions few would care to consider, and never does he bend to melodrama or overstatement.
In her film debut, Lupita Nyong’o’s almost otherworldly performance marks a profound talent.
Meanwhile, as the sadistic Master Epps, Michael Fassbender’s performance guarantees to be the most brilliantly unsettling piece of acting found onscreen this year. There is no stronger contender in this year’s Oscar race for best supporting actor, and likely none will show himself. He’s terrifying, and his performance feeds off the talent around him. The raw energy among the three – Fassbender, Ejiofor and Nyong’o – is sometimes too much to bear, and the three share a few scenes that are nearly too powerful to take in.
McQueen does not let the cast run away with his picture, though, and he mines a deep human beauty from Northup’s journey. He never forgets that while justice requires that Northup be delivered from slavery, it remains blind to all those people left on Epps’s plantation, many of whom faced a far more dire existence than Northup.
No romanticizing, no comic relief, just the abject truth of what will happen to a man, a woman, a young boy, and a little girl who is owned outright by the kind of human who believes owning another human is justified. It’s almost beyond comprehension, due not only to the fact it happened for 250 years in our own history, but because across the globe, it still happens every day in the world’s booming sex trade industry.
12 Years a Slave transcends filmmaking, ultimately become an event, one that is destined to leave a profound, lasting impression.
Ender’s Game
A gawky adolescent plays video games and saves the world. It’s easy to see why Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game is so popular with young boys. But the truth is that this SciFi thriller is more than just a simple adolescent male fantasy. It’s an intricately written coming of age story that pulls readers in, not just with the video game storyline, but a video game structure, as the hero defeats certain challenges before moving on to the next level, so to speak.
Though his screenplay is often inelegant in its adaptation, clunking through sections that must have been quite impressive in novel form, writer/director Gavin Hood’s affection for the source material is evident. So, too, is his skill with FX as well as casting.
Asa Butterfield (Hugo) leads the cast as Ender Wiggin, the pinch-shouldered spindle hoping to make it through the ranks of the military academy to help defend earth against an impending alien invasion. Butterfield’s vulnerability – physical and emotional – and obvious intelligence provide the character the compelling internal conflict the role requires.
SciFi legend Harrison Ford shows some effort as Ender’s commanding officer, while the always wonderful Viola Davis gives the film its emotional core, and allows Hood an opportunity to mine this story for some social commentary. “It used to be a war crime to recruit soldiers younger than 15,” she scolds Ford’s Colonel Graff.
Though visually impressive, the film’s cosmic FX pale in comparison to the entirely superior Gravity. Still, Hood knows how to put a crowd in the middle of a video game without giving off the immediately dated feel of Tron.
Though sometimes derivative, (Act 2 feels a bit too much like Top Gun, if you substitute teenaged video game nerds for hot, ambiguously gay volleyball players), the film eventually packs an emotional wallop. The climax is effective, but the resolution is rushed. These issues are symptomatic of the effort as a whole – fitfully entertaining, absorbing and gorgeous, and yet tonally challenged and poorly paced.
Hood’s greatest failing is that he settles for a thrill ride when he was handed a beloved, epic coming of age tragedy. Oddly enjoyable and intermittently wonderful, the film still feels like a mild letdown.
LAS VEGAS
By the end of Last Vegas, you get the feeling everyone involved had a darn good time filming it. Robert DeNiro, Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline got to hang together in Vegas for a few weeks, give the script the half-hearted effort it deserves, and leave happy.
Nice work if you can get it, too bad their fun doesn’t rub off on the rest of us.
The four Oscar winners play Paddy, Billy, Archie and Sam, lifelong friends who agree to meet in sin city for a..what else-bachelor party-just before Billy (Douglas) marries a woman less than half his age. Paddy (DeNiro) is still mourning the loss of his wife, while Archie (Freeman) is running from his overprotective son and Sam (Kline) has been given a hall pass by Mrs. Sam.
The guys are in Vegas about thirty seconds when they meet a beguiling lounge singer (Mary Steenburgen, making it 5 Oscar winners wasted in this cast) who is of course more than willing to be the Shirley MacLaine in their Rat Pack.
All these vets together on screen should be more of a hoot, but Dan Fogelman‘s screenplay never gives them the chance. Instead, we get lazy age gags, sit-com obviousness and force fed attempts at character development.
Fogelman is an odd bird. He’s capable of smart, nuanced efforts such as Crazy, Studio, Love., but is just as likely to churn out losers the likes of The Guilt Trip. Last Vegas is closer to the latter, with a dependency on telling you about the characters when showing you works so much better. Throwing us a funny bone or two would also have helped.
Director Jon Turtletaub (National Treasure/The Sorcerer’s Apprentice) is content to keep his eyes on the wrap party, as the slapped- together scenes shine with the polish of one, maybe even two full takes.
Look, this is a Vegas bachelor party movie, so I gotta say it: The Hangover may not have invented the niche, but it damn sure perfected it. Strangely, by lifting a couple scenes from that film, Last Vegas seems to invite the comparison.
Not a good idea.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKiLs1iBgmg