REVIEW: 12 Years A Slave (2014)

12 Years A Slave is the third feature film from artist turned director Steve McQueen, who is developing into a surprisingly mainstream filmmaker, following the somewhat esoteric Hunger and the challenging yet disappointingly conventional Shame. 12 Years A Slave is initially off-putting, being too much of an Oscar-friendly drama to fit easily alongside McQueen’s other work. In fact, it is when one forgets McQueen’s involvement that the film begins to work in its own right, an odd example of an auteur’s disappearance.

Based on a true story, the film follows Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free man in 1841 New York, who is kidnapped and sold into slavery. Over the next twelve years, he is passed between a variety of masters, learning along the way to keep his head down and tell no one about his previous situation. Northup thus leads a dangerous and precarious existence at the hands of white masters in the Deep South.

Steve McQueen’s films have always stridden a thin line between the art house and the multiplex. Hunger and Shame were both bleak and muted in a rather minimalist way and yet both remain fairly conventional in terms of story arcs. Shame fit neatly into a three-act structure and even offered rather simplistic explanations for its protagonist’s urges. It is difficult to see 12 Years A Slave as anything other than a Hollywood drama – something that is not helped by one traditional crane shot’s dodgy CGI landscape or by a few rather manipulative scenes. McQueen’s trademark long takes are still present, though they are much shorter and more embedded within the film’s storyline. Aside from some extreme violence, which is justified for the purposes of realism but which nonetheless represent a breaking from the tradition of the Hollywood drama, 12 Years A Slave is almost entirely conventional. The star cameos (Paul Giamatti, Paul Dano, Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Fassbender and Brad Pitt) are often off-putting, their sudden appearance taking you out of the film just when you were beginning not to notice the mechanics of the screenplay and direction.

That said, the film's moral complexity confronts the audience, forcing them to question their own feelings about the action onscreen, suggesting that American slavery was not a battle between innocent slaves and the evil white slave owners. Benedict Cumberbatch's Ford is a less obviously loathsome character than Fassbender's Epps - but then he is all the worse for his moralising does not extend as far as the question of slavery. As compassionate as he is, he is happy to turn a blind eye to what cruelty and suffering when he needs to. Steve McQueen is too good a filmmaker to let Ford off the hook, but neither does he openly berate him, instead showing the more corrosive side to the evil of slavery. Meanwhile, other slaves hold the whips and openly collude with their evil bosses. As well as this, the film offers a much more violent and bleak representation of American slavery yet seen, McQueen refusing to look away in order to represent what slavery is like without any respite for the audience. As a result, the film can be depressing and suffocating but then what true representation of slavery wouldn't be?

The film’s primary focus is on how Solomon Northup survives his ordeal and the alterations in his personality that are required to do this. Initially, Northup is outraged and indignant. Soon realizing that his past could be dangerous to him, he must act like a normal slave and not allow his masters to see him as anything different. He is thrown into a series of morally compromising situations and is constantly in danger of losing any sense of who he was. The film also focuses on his despair and his decision not to give up in the face of his apparently hopeless future. The film requires a strong performance to bring across this character’s duality and it has one in Ejiofor’s work, which avoids big Oscar-friendly histrionics (where other actors in the film itself may not) in favour of a quiet pain and anguish that is all the more believable. These themes coupled with a great central performance ensures that 12 Years A Slave succeeds both as a drama designed for mass entertainment and as something more interesting.

It is interesting to note that, in Django Unchained, Tarantino tries to develop a similar idea of the adapting that Django must overcome in order to survive – though he fails since he is much more interested in film references, long bouts of monologue and exploding bodies. Conversely, it is difficult to watch 12 Years A Slave and not wish for the kind of bloody satisfaction so gleefully though tediously doled out by Tarantino, although McQueen makes short shrift of the idea of violent revolution all too quickly and, it has to be said, convincingly. It is difficult to watch 12 Years A Slave so soon after Django Unchained – especially since one early scene in the former looks identical in terms of lighting and framing to the latter. 12 Years A Slave works in some ways as a riposte of Django Unchained, particularly in its much more honest focus on the victims of slavery, in their much more three-dimensional characterization and in the fact that Solomon Northup survives thanks to his own skills and not through the advice and assistance of a nice white man.

As a drama, 12 Years A Slave is most effective in its quiet moments, McQueen showing a flair for the more subtle drama of single scenes as well as in the more uncompromising scenes of institutional racism and brutality. As a whole, 12 Years A Slave moves through a variety of registers usually under the influence of its performers. Fassbender, Dano and Sarah Paulson overplay their scenes and the film seems over the top when they are centre stage, while it plays best when Ejiofor, Lupita Nyong’o and Adepero Oduye are given the space to act. Since it is tied so closely to its performances, 12 Years A Slave ultimately succeeds or fails on the quality of the work of its actors in individual scenes, making it a flawed and overblown yet effective and moving drama.

REVIEW: The Fifth Estate (2013)

Following the final two Twilight films with a topical, controversial and political film about WikiLeaks – the first fiction feature about Assange and his whistleblower website – should seem odd. However, anyone who can make anything halfway conventional out of the downright bizarre final instalment of the “Twilight” books is a safe pair of hands, and Bill Condon’s treatment of the WikiLeaks story seems, therefore, to be more a story of resistance, grey-area ethics and mutual recrimination than anything particularly polemical or rebellious – though it may work as an introduction for anyone who prefers their head in the sand.

In Berlin in 2007, Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch), the founder of a small website that offers to publish whistleblower information with full anonymity for the whistleblower, meets Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl) and is almost immediately taken by him. They dedicate themselves to making WikiLeaks the infamous and influential website that it would become. However, from the start, Domscheit-Berg is kept disconcertingly out of the loop. Meanwhile, Assange is moving further and further into uncharted territory, putting them both in danger.

The film is based partly on the book, “Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website” by Domscheit-Berg himself. This, and the reticence of Assange himself, makes the film feel one-sided with a hint of character assassination. The air of mystery that the film shrouds around Assange hinders Cumberbatch’s performance – his unknowability and unclear motivations leads to a vague central performance. Assange is ultimately a figure both heroic and villainous and a film made with such a Hollywood framework is unable to find any middle ground. It ends up with two extremes – where one grateful woman tells Assange that if he had been around during the Cold War the Berlin Wall would have fallen much sooner while we also see him as working primarily for himself. The film ends sharply on the latter point, with a line intentionally comic, but also, in a way, dismissive.

There are a lot of flashbacks and backstory given concerning Assange, which, given that the film will ultimately throw up its hands in seeming exasperation at the truth of Assange’s character, are rather unnecessary. They do not reveal much in particular, leaving a conventional tale about two friends with big ideas falling out – not unlike, say, The Social Network, another film with a lot of people looking at laptop screens though a lot less awkwardly. Condon seems to have attempted to pre-empt such criticisms with a series of flashy cuts and a dreamscape of The Crowd-style computers, each an alias for Assange, all utilised in an effort to explain hacking in what feel like simple terms. Otherwise, the film feels a little too tightly structured, with the complicated real world story twisted into a three-act structure, aided and abetted with lines like, “If you are going to put yourself on a cross, you should first find out what it is made of.” All of this distracts from the real meat of the story, the central issue that anything about WikiLeaks must address.

The central issue, and one that the film takes a long time getting to, is whether or not Assange should have released Bradley Manning’s leaked files with redactions in order to protect certain people from reprisals. Fairly conventionally, the film opts for an easy answer – Yes – with little debate, offering only ethics as the determining factor. This despite clearly showing the importance of full disclosure elsewhere, when revealing the vicious murder of civilians in Baghdad and subsequent cover-up perpetrated by US forces. Although The Fifth Estate does not choose the wrong answer to the above question, it does nevertheless offer simplistic, fairly conservative ones. It seemingly suggests that WikiLeaks’ exposures are justified as long as they are not too damaging to the US, that anything diplomatically survivable is fair game but anything too horrendous is best left under wraps. In typical Hollywood fashion, a complex question is represented with a definitive answer, a happy ending of justice done and full closure – if not full disclosure.

Having said that, The Fifth Estate remains somewhat nice to see, a further American film showing real world dissent – Batmanglij’s The East  is another recent example. Though neither are fully committed to anything too radical or risky and both opts for easy cop-outs, they are nevertheless films that recognise a prevalent villainy within the American establishment. The Fifth Estate is ultimately too safe, too apologetic – the sympathetically drawn State Department official Sarah Shaw’s (Laura Linney) point that “if you don’t want dirty pictures, don’t have dirty wars” is remarkably feeble since it suggests that the USA is justified in causing as much ‘collateral’ damage as it wants and, worse still, that the dirty war was somehow ‘wanted.’ Nevertheless, a wide audience for a film like The Fifth Estate may be a good thing, especially if it enrages and leads to further reading. As likely as this may or may not be, the fact remains that, The Fifth Estate is just not angry enough.

REVIEW: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

  Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is both the tirelessly faithful adaptation of the John le Carré novel and the next film by Tomas Alfredson, who had critic’s falling over themselves to come up with new superlatives to describe the admittedly somewhat messy Let The Right One In. Boasting a fantastic cast and much critical kudos, does Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy see the mainstream arrival of a new talent?

  The plot of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is as convoluted as you would expect of any faithful adaptation of such a book. Put simply, George Smiley (Gary Oldman) plays an espionage agent who is brought back from a forced retirement in order to find a mole in the British Intelligence network. His suspects are represented by the four figures of the title and are played by Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Ciarán Hinds and David Dencik. Helping him is Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hardy and Trigger from “Only Fools and Horses” Roger Lloyd-Pack.

  The film is entirely plot-driven and convoluted in the style of modern-day serious thrillers, which basically means withholding key pieces of information. For example, towards the end, one character is to be traded for someone that the Soviets have imprisoned. This is never said, but the fact that it has been mentioned before in a different context is deemed enough of a clue. Ultimately, it is a film that makes you think it is more intelligent than it actually is. However, it is a fairly straightforward film that is only confusing when it tries very hard to be. A case in point, the introduction of Tom Hardy’s character, which is not referred to before and not explained until long after it occurs.

  Another hallmark of the ‘serious modern thriller’ is a period detail. The film is set in 1973 and a lot of the running time is spent on showing the production design. The convincing costumes and the carefully placed period props get more of a focus than the characters. This is the film’s major stumbling block. Being a faithful adaptation, it deals with too much information, becoming almost pedantic in the amount of detail it tries to bring across, and being a period film, it focuses too much on creating a realistic 1970s England. So much so that the characters becomes ciphers, merely plot points and catalysts to move things forward. We never see their motivations, their weaknesses or their strengths. They are all just very serious people doing very serious things, but with no soul. Few of the actors get a chance to shine, raising the question of why they bothered signing up for such a small role. Like Tom Hollander’s character in In The Loop, they are merely ‘meat in the room’ for much of the running time.

  Tomas Alfredson’s directorial preoccupation seems to be based on bringing arthouse techniques to genre filmmaking. His Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, like his Let The Right One In, is awash with formalist framings and very deliberate pacing. The final confrontation between Smiley and the culprit is left largely unseen and characters are constantly framed alongside symmetrical objects. While this style is commendable, especially now with cinemas crowded with over-edited and special effects laden bores such as Transformers, it doesn’t work in films that should be a bit more fun and a bit more exciting. Alfredson clearly thinks that Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a serious meditation on the mores of the 1970s and the paranoia and cruelty of the Cold War, but the film is rarely successful from this perspective. Indeed, the film’s final shot suggests a film that is more ironic and cynical than its stony seriousness and pretentious trappings would suggest. Mostly it is a rather trashy story that is too slow and too stretched to be much good.

  Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is intended to be serious and profound, but it merely achieves the level of rainy Sunday afternoon entertainment. It is a misfire, but it is a reasonably diverting and somewhat pretty misfire.