7) 12 Years a Slave
It takes all kinds of movies to make a rich cinematic world, and movies that leave you curled up in a ball on the floor are every bit as vital as the ones that make you want to dance. It’s true that all movies, even those that make us face the darkest corners of our real world, contain an element of escapism, but it’s in that removal from the ordinary world, that escape, that we possess a unique ability to confront the most shameful human impulses and actions.
That’s why a movie like 12 Years a Slave, an undeniably difficult movie to watch, is worth seeing, digesting, and after some time to think and recover, seeing again. There’s so much good writing on the movie that I would encourage folks to seek out others’ thoughts on it (Wesley Morris in particular).
Director Steve McQueen has a history of depicting desperate situations involving people pushed to their limits, but he’s outdone himself by a long shot with 12 Years, chronicling the profound toll the institution of slavery had on everyone involving, and by extension, on the country that couldn’t let it go. But it does this without keeping the pure physical brutality front and center: the hanging sequence being the most famous example. The most agonizing part of the film is that at the end of the 12 years when Solomon is reunited with his family and we’re expecting some relief, there is none. All that remains is pain that won’t go away.