12 Years a Slave (Regency Enterprises, River Road Entertainment, Plan B Entertainment, New Regency Productions, Film4, Summit Entertainment, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2013)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, September 18) my husband Charles and I watched a compelling but also draining movie called 12 Years a Slave, made in 2013 by director Steve McQueen (an African-British filmmaker and not the legendary late white American action star of the 1960’s and 1970’s) from a script by John Ridley based on an 1853 slave memoir by Solomon Northup. Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) was a free Black man living in Saratoga, New York in 1841 and making an occasional living as a violinist (Ejiofor looks credible playing the instrument, though Tim Fain was his soundtrack double). Then he was lured away from his relatively comfortable life with his wife Anne (Kelsey Scott), daughter Margaret (Quvenzhané Wallis), and son Alonzo (Cameron Zeigler) by two white entrepreneurs, Brown (Scoot McNairy) and Hamilton (Taran Killam). They say they want him to perform with their circus for two weeks, but they get him drunk on the first night and when he comes to he’s literally shackled and being held in a slave pen. He’s in the custody of slave dealers James H. Burch (Christopher Berry) and Theophilus Freeman (Paul Giamatti), who announce to him that he’s considered a runaway slave from Georgia named Platt. He’s sold to New Orleans (in Northup’s original memoir he mentions that a smallpox epidemic broke out among the slaves in his shipment and one of them died and was buried along the way, but this isn’t included in the movie) and ends up the property of plantation owner William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch). Ford takes a liking to “Platt” and gives him a violin so he can entertain his guests at plantation “big house” parties, but his overseer Tibeats (Paul Dano) can’t stand him and rides him hard until Northup makes the mistake of fighting back, grabbing the whip with which Tibeats was about to beat him. Tibeats and his gang attempt to lynch Northup, and he’s strung up for hours until Ford finally comes along and rescues him. Ford has financial troubles and tries to get of them by selling Northup a.k.a. “Platt” to Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender, who also starred in McQueen’s immediately previous film Shame), who’s described in the dialogue as “a notorious nigger-breaker.” (I like the fact that what’s usually and cutesily described these days as “the ‘N’-word” is used throughout this film, not only by white characters expressing their racism but by Black ones, often criticizing each other for having given in so totally to the slave mentality they’ve lost all will to resist.)

Epps is also having a decidedly nonconsensual affair – remember that under the laws of slavery a man had a legal right to rape anyone he owned because they were considered “property” – with Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), a slave on his plantation and either his star cotton-picker (she’s reported as picking over 500 pounds a day when everybody else is picking in the high 100’s or low 200’s) or getting her stats inflated by the owner’s obvious interest in her. Epps’s interest in Patsey is so obvious that his wife (Sarah Paulson) has got jealous of her, though when she complains to Epps he reminds her that she was just a poor white-trash girl he picked up in a bar and he can always send her back from whence she came. At one point, thinking of escape, Northup wanders through the woods, only to be discouraged when he comes upon a lynching party of poor whites who’d captured runaway slaves and, instead of returning them to their masters, just killed them. Northup hasn’t given up hope of contacting his family up North and getting them to lobby for his release, but when he puts together writing materials (stealing paper from a supply Mrs. Epps told him to buy her, carving his own pen, and making his ink from blackberry juice), he entrusts its delivery to Armsby (Garret Dillahunt). Armsby is a white former slave overseer who fell into alcoholism and ended up reduced to being a common field hand, picking cotton alongside the slaves he used to drive. But Armsby double-crosses Northup to Epps in hopes of getting his old overseer job back, and a frustrated Northup burns the letter he wrote his wife because for a slave it’s a whipping offense to know how to read and write. Meanwhile Patsey has sneaked off the Epps plantation to visit another one nearby, and Epps catches her and insists that she be whipped within an inch of her life. Epps seems to think Patsey was whoring herself to the other plantation owner, but she was really just asking for soap because the jealous Mrs. Epps had forbidden her to have any and without being able to bathe, she was starting to reek so much she was offended by her own smell. (Was Mrs. Epps hoping that by making Patsey literally stink, she’d get her husband to stop screwing her?) Patsey asks that Northup be assigned to administer the whipping, but Epps notices that Northup is pulling his blows, grabs the whip himself, and nearly kills Patsey with the force of his beating her. Then Patsey receives treatment with an improvised salve made by her fellow slaves, whose application seems to hurt her almost as much as the whipping did.

After years enduring the Kafkaesque torture of being wrongly enslaved, Northup is finally saved through an unlikely white deus ex machina, Bass (Brad Pitt, delivering a surprisingly sensitive performance), a building contractor from Canada who’s hired by Epps to build a gazebo on his property. Bass gets Northup to help with the construction, and while they’re working together he tells Northup that he’s morally opposed to slavery. Northup feels safe confiding in Bass despite what happened to him the last time he trusted a white man to help him, and he tells him his whole origin story. Bass promises to help, which he does by mailing Northup’s latest attempt to write his wife and children and getting Parker (Rob Steinburg), a store owner the Northups knew in New York, to come with him to Louisiana and identify Northup to the local sheriff as someone who’s legally free. Northup returns home to New York the free man he always was by law, and he meets his wife, and children (now grown adults; Margaret is played by Devyn A. Tyler and she has a husband, played by Willo Jean-Baptiste, and a child of her own, so Northup learns he’s a grandfather). A printed epilogue states that Northup tried to have his abductors prosecuted but couldn’t because in Washington, D.C., where the initial crime took place, Blacks were not allowed to testify in court against whites. Instead he became an activist for abolition and wrote a memoir, Twelve Years a Slave (note that Northup’s title began with the word “Twelve” while the film’s begins with the numeral), which he dedicated to Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Stowe noted that Northup had spent his twelve years as a slave in the Red River country of Louisiana, where Stowe had set her novel, and she used his memoir as a counter to people who accused her of making up the story out of whole cloth to make slavery look bad. At least partly because of Stowe’s endorsement, Northup’s book sold three times as many copies as Frederick Douglass’s memoir of his years as a slave.

Northup ended his book with these words: “My narrative is at an end. I have no comments to make upon the subject of Slavery. Those who read this book may form their own opinions of the ‘peculiar institution.’ What it may be in other States, I do not profess to know; what it is in the region of Red River, is truly and faithfully delineated in these pages. This is no fiction, no exaggeration. If I have failed in anything, it has been in presenting to the reader too prominently the bright side of the picture. I doubt not hundreds have been as unfortunate as myself; that hundreds of free citizens have been kidnapped and sold into slavery, and are at this moment wearing out their lives on plantations in Texas and Louisiana. But I forbear. Chastened and subdued in spirit by the sufferings I have borne, and thankful to that good Being through whose mercy I have been restored to happiness and liberty, I hope henceforward to lead an upright though lowly life, and rest at last in the church yard where my father sleeps.” (Ironically, it’s not known when and where Northup died, or where his remains ended up; modern historian Joseph Logsdon, who co-edited a 1968 republication of Twelve Years a Slave, planned to make a search but died himself before he could do so.) Though 12 Years a Slave is a powerful denunciation of slavery as it existed in the American South in the 1840’s and the 1850’s, I did feel after a while that I was being manipulated. I wondered whether screenwriter Ridley had cherry-picked Northup’s memoir to highlight the most brutal aspects of his experience, or whether Northup himself had done so when he wrote his original book. Modern critic Eric Herschtal has acknowledged, “Slave narratives were never intended to give an unbiased view. They were anti-slavery polemics meant to bring down the institution.”

Technically, 12 Years a Slave is a well-made movie; while director McQueen and his cinematographer, Sean Bobbitt, occasionally falls into past-is-brown effects (perhaps justifying it because when their movie takes place, nighttime illumination still relied on candles and occasionally lamps), much of the film takes place during bright daylight. There’s an almost tactile sense of the beauty of the countryside and an ironic contrast with the horrific events taking place in it. Also McQueen and Bobbitt include a few gimmicky visuals, including the sight of a paddle-wheel steamer churning up the river water, for the most part they shoot the film plainly and effectively. Ironically, Charles had the opposite reaction to the film than I did; he thought there were too many scenes of the slaves celebrating each other, washing each other (it occurred to me that a large part of the racist myth that Blacks smell worse than whites is a legacy of both slavery and the subsequent plantation sharecropping system that condemned most of them to farm labor, which among other things gave them few opportunities to wash), singing spirituals and, in one remarkable scene, sending off a dead comrade to “Roll, Jordan, Roll.” (For some reason, Nicholas Britell, who assisted composer Hans “Room Man” Zimmer in writing the film’s score, junked the song’s beautiful original melody and wrote one of his own.) There’s even one strange scene in which the slave masters are getting their slaves to sing a rather strange song called “Run, Nigger, Run,” which was one of the old African-American folk songs Alan and John Lomax collected in the 1930’s and 1940’s. It seemed bizarre, to say the least, that white slave owners would encourage their slaves to sing a song that at least appears to celebrate a slave’s escape. There are also a few scenes showing the carefully sanitized version of Christianity the masters were teaching their slaves, one which emphasized the duty of slaves to submit to their owners and downplayed all that stuff about the Israelites escaping bondage. (I’ve heard elsewhere that there was a special “slaves’ Bible” – which white ministers read to the slaves because slaves were punished severely if they learned to read or write – which cut the entire Book of Exodus down to just three chapters.) After we watched the film I joked to Charles that if Verdi had been submitted this script as an opera libretto, he probably would have turned it down as too extreme and downbeat.

I also thought a lot about the 1942 Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur masterpiece I Walked with a Zombie, and in particular of how much more courage it took to make an anti-racist film in 1942 than it did in 2013. Though I Walked with a Zombie takes place in the 1942 present, well after the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire in 1834 (31 years before the U.S. did it, and without having to endure a civil war over it), it’s clear that the rich white characters are all suffering from the moral burden of still living lives of privilege based on fortunes accumulated from slave labor. My admiration for I Walked with a Zombie (despite its horrible title) has grown over the years, especially when I realized the significance of Val Lewton having tried to talk David O. Selznick out of making Gone with the Wind; maybe instead of doubting the commercial appeal of Margaret Mitchell’s romanticization of the ante-bellum South and its “peculiar institution,” Lewton was giving it a “woke” reading, seeing the depiction of slavery in Gone with the Wind as the racist nonsense it is. By now virtually everyone in the U.S. (with occasional exceptions like Florida Governor Ron De Santis, who’s on record as making the preposterous claim that slavery benefited the slaves by teaching them manual skills) pretty much agrees that slavery was a terrible thing. It’s a point underscored in one of the few genuinely subtle scenes in 12 Years a Slave, in which slaves are being examined by potential purchasers as if they were livestock and one slave dealer boasts that a particular piece of merchandise “hasn’t been sick a day in his life.” (Today he'd be a used-car dealer similarly assuring the would-be buyer that the car he’s selling has never been in an accident.) At least the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave 12 Years a Slave the Best Picture award – it still rankles me that six years later they gave the Best Picture Oscar to Green Book, a liberal film in which the Black characters exist merely to provide moral redemption to the white ones, instead of a radical masterpiece like Black Panther in which the Black characters (even the unsympathetic ones) have agency and independence – but as I noted above, the kind of up-front anti-racist stance Lewton and Tourneur took in I Walked with a Zombie (and probably got away with only because it was written off as another cheap horror “B” with a lurid title) in 1942 really wasn’t that much of a risk, either artistically or commercially, in 2013.