OTH ER N O M I N ATED CATEGORIES Adapted Screenplay; Cinematography; Director; Editing; Leading Actor; Original Music; Production Design; Supporting Actor; Supporting Actress
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BEST FILM NOMINEES Anthony Katagas, Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Steve McQueen
outside. Instead, Steve McQueen puts us inside the experience. The director had been looking for a way to explore 19th century slavery when his wife gave him the memoir of Solomon Northup, a free citizen of 1840s’ New York who was abducted and sold into slavery in the South. McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley use this remarkable man as our conduit into a horror not often enough imagined. We stand beside him as he suffers, from the frank evil of Paul Giamatti’s slave trader, to the tortured menace of Michael Fassbender’s plantation owner. Though perhaps the most troubling character is Benedict Cumberbatch’s more kindly slaver Ford, who smothers conscience with fear, prompting the question: would we do the same? One criticism has been that Northup is too passive a protagonist, which seems a slightly peculiar observation to make of a true story about a man stuck in slavery. The fi lm shares something of the formalist approach of McQueen’s previous fi lms Hunger (2008), which won the Outstanding Debut BAFTA in 2009, and double BAFTAnominee Shame (2011) – both about being trapped, either physically or mentally – and perhaps a more conservative style or ostentatiously heroic lead might have made for a more accessible picture, but it wouldn’t be as honest. We’re used to a certain degree of self-determination in our characters – and our lives – which the grind of this reality does not allow. (It is a reality not simply of the past, either: charities such as Love146 are working to highlight and end the contemporary problem. The United Nations estimates there are 20.9 million people enslaved today.) Still, Northup does consider escaping and fights to be free, while Chiwetel Ejiofor’s miraculous performance ensures that, even in his silent struggles, the soul of the character speaks. Perhaps a sense of Solomon’s passivity is exaggerated because the fi lm arrives a year after the shot-for-the-hip, Western wish-fulfi lment fantasy of Django Unchained (2012). It won’t be long, if it hasn’t happened already, before some enterprising cinema plays them in a double bill. But the running order can now be reversed, as it should be. Watch McQueen’s picture first, because before you can play with the truth, people need to know the truth. It can set them free.