Our next Best Picture nominee is 12 Years a Slave.
What I’m doing is posting my five favorite moments from each of the Best Picture nominees. It’s a nice way to take a break from all the Oscar stuff to remind myself (and all of us) that once you take away all the competition and the awards, what we’re left with is great cinema. That’s what it’s about.
Here are my favorite moments from 12 Years a Slave:
5. Patsy’s “act of kindness”
I like how it’s not overdone. How she’s like, “Look, I got you this. Now do me a favor. Please kill me.” It’s powerful in its simplicity (which will be a theme of this article).
I think the two lines that say it all are:
“How can you fall into such despair?”
“How can you not?”
That’s some powerful shit.
4. The simplicity of the brutality. Simple moments are the most effective. We’ll come to this later on, but that’s what really stands out to me. Michael K. Williams on the boat, getting stabbed out of nowhere, and then they dump him overboard, and that’s it. We move on. Or Solomon having a confrontation with Paul Dano, and then turning and seeing Eliza taken away. This woman is likely going away to either be killed or sold into the worst possible situation, and it just happens, and we see it, and we move on. It’s just atrocity after atrocity, and it’s just commonplace.
3. The rape scene.
No words need to be said. That’s some powerful, horrible shit.
2. This shot.
I’m not gonna make it #1, just because everyone will. But it’s a powerful shot, because it represents a lot of things at once. And I think we all understand that, and we don’t need to talk about all of that. Mostly, what I’m impressed about most of all — they actually shot this. That is to say — Chiwetel Ejiofor had to stand like that, his neck in a rope, just high enough for him to feel the constraints, and just low enough to not be in that much danger, yet he had to stand there for the entire duration of this shot. And that’s impressive in itself. So, I can talk about all the things this shot represents, and the beauty of it and all that, but I felt that was the thing I really wanted to talk about, because it is very impressive. (Also, the fact that business starts going on as usual after a minute in the background also adds to the overall effect of the shot.)
(Oh, also, the girl coming up and giving him water is a truly fantastic moment, that’s not talked about enough in relation to this shot.)
1. “Something to eat, and some rest. Your children will soon be forgotten.”
This is the most absurd moment in the film. Of all the torture scenes, and all of that, this is the moment that made me do a double take. That’s the most fucked up thing anyone says in this entire movie. This woman was separated from her children (and there’s a nice moment where Solomon picks up the fiddle to drown out the screams of his happening), and they’re just like, “Oh, you’ll forget them soon. Don’t worry.” It really speaks to how low white people considered blacks. They don’t have feelings. Their bonds with their children aren’t the same as ours. They’re like animals. Separate an animal from its children, it moves on quickly enough. It’s the absolute worst thing said in this movie, and it’s perhaps one of the simplest things said.
