This is part 4 of Benjamin Rybeck’s coverage of the Best Adapted Screenplay nominees at the 86th Academy Awards. Full spoilers follow.
The adaptation of Twelve Years a Slave—the 1853 memoir of Solomon Northup, a free man kidnapped and sold into slavery—is remarkable, the result of numerous artists and craftsmen working at an extraordinarily high level. Northup tells a story so disturbing and compelling that John Ridley’s screenplay—and the film itself, directed by Steve McQueen—seeks not to transform the memoir, but to honor it.
At the beginning of Twelve Years a Slave, Northup writes that he “can speak of Slavery only so far as it came under [his] own observation”; thus, long passages in which he describes the clothes of the period, or reports on the geography of Louisiana, or gives the reader a lesson in processing sugarcane, have been adapted faithfully into the film’s visuals (no doubt the production crew pored over Northup’s precise language).
Northup’s focus on textbook-like detail—as well as his tendency to gesture toward events that will happen after his enslavement ends—means that Twelve Years a Slave’s voice stands a bit removed from the action it describes. Northup avoids creating any sort of “present tense” out of his time as a slave; why would he want to embody those experiences again, even in prose? Instead, he remains clear about his position as a narrator: He no interest in imagining himself back in hell. Instead, his tale is a history from which he maintains necessary psychological distance.
This distance must have appealed to Steve McQueen as a director. His two previous films—Hunger and Shame—focus on physical and psychological suffering, but hold the action at a remove. He favors static long shots, choosing his close-ups carefully (think of the intense moment in Shame when Carey Mulligan performs “New York, New York”) instead of employing them in standard over-the-shoulder coverage during dialogue scenes (which he sometimes shoots in one long, unbroken take).
In 12 Years a Slave, McQueen moves his camera more often, but his unconventional handling of the material echoes Northup’s own narrative distance, while also (frankly) keeping the film from becoming unwatchable due to either violence or (as with, say, Amistad) sentimentality. As Northup is first whipped, McQueen focuses not on the wounds but on actor Chiwetel Ejiofor’s pained face as he absorbs the beating. In a later shot—already famous—McQueen uses a wide angle to show Northup hanged on a tree branch with only his tiptoes touching the muddy ground, as behind him the plantation goes about its business. In these moments, McQueen doesn’t cut away, forcing us to stare at the brutality, but refusing to underline it for emotional effect.
Unlike Terrence Winter’s adaptation of The Wolf of Wall Street, screenwriter John Ridley seldom has to combine events from Northup’s memoir; instead, he usually chooses the most potent one (a horrifying testament to how much cruelty the book contains). Northup works on many plantations, for many masters of varying degrees of evilness, but Ridley streamlines his screenplay into a clear contrast between the (comparatively) benevolent William Ford and the sadistic Edwin Epps. (In his memoir, Northup praises William Ford without reservation, but Ridley adds an exchange between Northup and his fellow slave, Eliza, in which she reminds him that, no matter what, Ford is still a slaver.)
Ridley transforms the memoir most strikingly in his treatment of the Epps plantation and, in particular, the character of Patsey, using her to represent a much greater breadth of suffering. The film draws out not only Epps’ obsession with Patsey, but also Patsey’s relationship with Mistress Shaw on a neighboring plantation. (Actress Lupita Nyong’o added Patsey’s habit of making corn-husk dolls, a detail that makes the character seem fuller in the film than in the memoir.)
Everything leads to a moment when Edwin Epps strips Patsey naked and commands Northup to whip her. In this sequence, director McQueen ditches that visual remove I discussed earlier. Instead, his camera becomes hand-held, darting around the action without cutting away, showing Patsey’s skin in gruesome detail as the whip lacerates it, lash after lash after lash. The memoir continues past this moment, dedicating a great deal of time to the (difficult) efforts to free Northup. The film, on the other hand, shows the freeing of Northup quickly. Technically, Northup leaving Epp’s plantation is the climax—but by placing Patsey’s whipping so close to the end, McQueen and Ridley transform it into the narrative’s most important moment.
Despite Northup’s claim of subjectivity—that he can only communicate his own experiences—the overwhelming impression left by the film 12 Years a Slave is that the horrors of slavery were much larger than this one man. Post-script reminds us that none of Northup’s tormentors were ever punished and that he died under unknown circumstances, not the most optimistic notes to follow an ostensibly “happy” ending. And, of course, there is the haunting moment when Patsey watches Northup ride away, rescued, from Epps’ plantation; he may be going home, but Patsey—like many others—is doomed. For Ridley and McQueen, Patsey carries the burden of history.
