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In another astonishing scene, the hero, Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor, pictured), is hanged from a tree by a noose. For an agonizingly long time, he gulps for air, his feet only just touching the muddy ground. But Mr. McQueen doesn’t ratchet up the tension with dramatic music or exploitative close-ups. He simply lets the ordeal carry on and on, while in the background, servants go about their business and children play. It’s not until the film is almost over that a Canadian laborer articulates the notion that slavery might be wrong. In the meantime, even Northup accepts that it’s a fact of life. His only complaint is that it shouldn’t be a fact of his life.
Northup, upon whose memoir the film is based, begins the narrative as a free man. In 1841, he’s living as a respected, middle-class violinist with his wife and two children in Saratoga, New York. But after an elegant evening’s dining in Washington DC, he is kidnapped. He wakes to find himself chained up in a cell and informed that he’s a “runaway nigger” from Georgia. When he objects, his jailer whips him viciously. Another prisoner then advises him that his only chance of survival is to keep quiet about his true identity.
And so Northup is transported beyond the Mason-Dixon Line to a nightmarish new existence where he has no choice but to pick cotton, cut sugar cane and bide his time. His first owner treats him kindly—but he still treats him as a possession. His next owner seems to have some cloudy comprehension of the insanity of slavery, but he would rather blot out that comprehension with alcohol and fevered sadism than face it.
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