Tag: Wesley Morris

“12 Years a Slave is an easy landmark. It’s a rare sugarless movie about racial inequality…[A]t several points an audience is free to remember that most movies about the Civil War and slavery have been appeals to our higher, nobler selves. They’ve been appeals to white audiences by white characters talking to other white characters about the inherent injustice of oppressing black people at any moment in this planet’s history…McQueen and Ridley turn that dynamic inside out.”

In Grantland, Wesley Morris ably discourses on Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, thus far the movie of the year (and I say that as someone who didn’t think much of Hunger or Shame.) As I said on Twitter, this film should come as a free digital download with any Lee Greenwood CD (or, for that matter, any Gods and Generals DVD.) “A different movie might have taken this story and turned it into a battle between Epps and the white men who feel a duty to free Northrup…The power of McQueen’s movie is in its declaratory style: This happened. That is all, and that is everything.”