Review of 12 Years a Slave (2013)

Moving picture, 134 minutes

Seen in 2016.

Ejiofor and Fassbender are excellent in this. The more famous white actors (Giamatti, Pitt, Cumberbatch) detract from the otherwise fine illusion of the long, linear narrative, simply by being famous.

The spoken English is too literary, the scene of Solomon hanging by his neck for hours with almost no support from the ground is especially hard to believe, and the handling of his letter-writing has the character of an unlikely thriller, when in the book he has a letter reach his family before he even gets to New Orleans.

References here: Harriet (2019).

moving picture fiction