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The Strong, Largely Silent Type
By A. O. SCOTT
True solitude is a rarity at the movies, for those of us in the audience contending with yakkers and texters, and for the people on screen as well. The lonesome strangers of the old westerns almost always had a town to ride into or out of, a buzz of social life to contrast with their individualistic ways. Even movies that emphasize the isolation of their main characters tend to provide them with companions, human or otherwise. Piscine Patel in “Life of Pi” had his tiger, Richard Parker; Chuck Noland in “Cast Away” had Wilson the volleyball. Those guys did a lot of talking, even when nobody else was around.
The guy in J. C. Chandor’s amazing “All Is Lost” — identified only as “Our Man” in the credits and instantly recognizable as Robert Redford, giving the performance of his life — says almost nothing at all. For the duration of the film, he is the only person in sight. In the opening scene, we hear his voice as he composes a letter of apology and farewell, presumably to unspecified loved ones back home. Later — or rather earlier, since most of the story flashes back from that moment of fatalism, eight days into his ordeal — he tries to send a distress call over the radio and tosses a few epithets at his fate. Otherwise, he is silent. And though this man’s radical aloneness is terrifying, to him and to us, it is also a condition he has chosen, one we might even envy, just as his taciturn competence is something we are inclined to admire.
He finds himself in the Indian Ocean, in the empty waters between Indonesia and Madagascar, on a solo sailing voyage. We infer that he is someone who can afford a comfortable, well-appointed yacht and the leisure to pilot it in exotic places, something he also clearly has the skill to do. He’s rich, American and handsome. (He’s Robert Redford.)
What else do we know about Our Man? He wears a wedding ring and an air of poised, understated confidence. In the midst of a desperate crisis, he takes the time to shave, and we might wonder whether this act of grooming under duress is evidence of self-discipline or vanity. Even when he is absorbed in practical matters that have life-or-death consequences, our ancient mariner maintains a sense of style; there is a subtle self-consciousness in his efforts to embody the old Hemingway-esque ideal of grace under pressure. He is a model of masculine virtue and he knows it. (He’s Robert Redford.)
The ancient Greeks believed that character should be revealed through action. I can’t think of another film that has upheld this notion so thoroughly and thrillingly. There is certainly no other actor who can command our attention — our empathy, our loyalty, our love — with such efficiency. Mr. Redford has always been a magnificent underplayer, a master of small, clear gestures and soft-spoken intensity. This role brings him to the pinnacle of reticence but also allows him to open up in startling ways. Behind the leathery, pragmatic exterior is a reservoir of inexpressible emotion. An opera thunders in the silence.
“All Is Lost,” an action movie in the most profound and exalted sense of the term, has a simple plot that I hesitate to summarize, less for fear of spoiling anything than because a précis would either miss the point or recapitulate the whole film. A lot goes wrong. An errant shipping container punches a hole in the hull. The cabin floods, and the onboard electrical system is ruined. A ferocious storm spins, tosses and smashes the boat. Attempts to communicate are foiled by rotten luck and the metaphysical indifference of the universe.
Through it all, the man perseveres, in his patient, problem-solving way. He patches his beloved boat’s wound with epoxy and cloth, hauls out the storm jib, gathers provisions for the lifeboat and digs up a never-used, old-fashioned mariner’s sextant. Using this, a sheaf of maps and a copy of “Celestial Navigation for Yachtsmen,” he sets a course for commercial shipping lanes, hoping for rescue from the big boats that were, indirectly but with unmistakable metaphorical significance, the cause of his predicament.
Like other tales of survival at sea — a robust literary tradition that includes classic books by Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville — “All Is Lost” manifests a strong allegorical undercurrent. Nothing registers the fragility and contingency of the human presence in the universe quite as starkly as the sight of a small vessel adrift on an endless ocean, and few representations of heroism are as vivid as the spectacle of an individual fighting to master the caprices of wind and water.
But this is not — or not only — a parable of Man against Nature, ready-made for high school term paper analysis. The physical details that carry the story and make it suspenseful and absorbing are also vessels of specific meaning, and together they add up to a fable about the soul of man under global capitalism. Our man is a privileged consumer (just look at all the stuff he has on that boat) whose fate is set in motion by a box full of goods (children’s sneakers, as it happens) accidentally knocked out of circulation.
It is this catastrophe and the man’s desperate efforts to correct it that link “All Is Lost” with “Margin Call,” Mr. Chandor’s excellent first feature. That movie, about an office full of panicky investment bankers dealing with the unfolding financial crisis of 2008, is in many ways the opposite of “All Is Lost.” It takes place almost entirely indoors, and it’s pretty much all talk. But it is also very much concerned with how powerful men react when their sense of control is challenged, and with the vast, invisible system that sustains their illusions.
Our Man is a more complicated hero than he seems, and shades of ambiguity and implication filter in through the sharply defined, crisply composed images of his struggle. I’m reminded again of Conrad, and not only because “All Is Lost” is an appealing and exciting maritime adventure with one eye on the geopolitical state of the world.
Conrad once famously identified his goal as a writer as “to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see.”
A good filmmaker will not take that for granted, even with the advantage of a visual medium, and Mr. Chandor more than fulfills Conrad’s criterion of artistic achievement: “If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand — and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.”
“All Is Lost” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Our Man swears twice.
All Is Lost
Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.
Written and directed by J. C. Chandor; director of photography, Frank G. DeMarco; underwater director of photography, Peter Zuccarini; edited by Pete Beaudreau; music by Alex Ebert; production design by John P. Goldsmith; visual effects supervisor, Robert Munroe; produced by Neal Dodson, Anna Gerb, Justin Nappi and Teddy Schwarzman; released by Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes.
WITH: Robert Redford (Our Man).
from capitalism's global corporatism to its primitive accumulation phase . . . from allegory to so direct
The Blood and Tears, Not the Magnolias
By MANOHLA DARGIS
“12 Years a Slave” isn’t the first movie about slavery in the United States — but it may be the one that finally makes it impossible for American cinema to continue to sell the ugly lies it’s been hawking for more than a century. Written by John Ridley and directed by Steve McQueen, it tells the true story of Solomon Northup, an African-American freeman who, in 1841, was snatched off the streets of Washington, and sold. It’s at once a familiar, utterly strange and deeply American story in which the period trappings long beloved by Hollywood — the paternalistic gentry with their pretty plantations, their genteel manners and all the fiddle-dee-dee rest — are the backdrop for an outrage.
The story opens with Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) already enslaved and cutting sugar cane on a plantation. A series of flashbacks shifts the story to an earlier time, when Solomon, living in New York with his wife and children, accepts a job from a pair of white men to play violin in a circus. Soon the three are enjoying a civilized night out in Washington, sealing their camaraderie with heaping plates of food, flowing wine and the unstated conviction — if only on Solomon’s part — of a shared humanity, a fiction that evaporates when he wakes the next morning shackled and discovers that he’s been sold. Thereafter, he is passed from master to master.
It’s a desperate path and a story that seizes you almost immediately with a visceral force. But Mr. McQueen keeps everything moving so fluidly and efficiently that you’re too busy worrying about Solomon, following him as he travels from auction house to plantation, to linger long in the emotions and ideas that the movie churns up. Part of this is pragmatic — Mr. McQueen wants to keep you in your seat, not force you out of the theater, sobbing — but there’s something else at work here. This is, he insists, a story about Solomon, who may represent an entire subjugated people and, by extension, the peculiar institution, as well as the American past and present. Yet this is also, emphatically, the story of one individual.
Unlike most of the enslaved people whose fate he shared for a dozen years, the real Northup was born into freedom. (His memoir’s telegraphing subtitle is “Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, From a Cotton Plantation Near the Red River, in Louisiana.”) That made him an exceptional historical witness, because even while he was inside slavery — physically, psychologically, emotionally — part of him remained intellectually and culturally at a remove, which gives his book a powerful double perspective. In the North, he experienced some of the privileges of whiteness, and while he couldn’t vote, he could enjoy an outing with his family. Even so, he was still a black man in antebellum America.
Mr. McQueen is a British visual artist who made a rough transition to movie directing with his first two features, “Hunger” and “Shame,” both of which were embalmed in self-promoting visuals. “Hunger” is the sort of art film that makes a show of just how perfectly its protagonist, the Irish dissident Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), smears his excrement on a prison wall. “Shame,” about a sex addict (Mr. Fassbender again), was little more than glossy surfaces, canned misery and preening directorial virtuosity. For “12 Years a Slave,” by contrast, Mr. McQueen has largely dispensed with the conventions of art cinema to make something close to a classical narrative; in this movie, the emphasis isn’t on visual style but on Solomon and his unmistakable desire for freedom.
There’s nothing ambivalent about Solomon. Mr. Ejiofor has a round, softly inviting face, and he initially plays the character with the stunned bewilderment of a man who, even chained, can’t believe what is happening to him. Not long after he’s kidnapped, Solomon sits huddled with two other prisoners on a slaver’s boat headed south. One man insists that they should fight their crew. A second disagrees, saying, “Survival’s not about certain death, it’s about keeping your head down.” Seated between them, Solomon shakes his head no. Days earlier he was home. “Now,” he says, “you tell me all is lost?” For him, mere survival cannot be enough. “I want to live.”
This is Solomon’s own declaration of independence, and an assertion of his humanity that sustains him. It’s also a seamlessly structured scene that turns a discussion about the choices facing enslaved people — fight, submit, live — into cinema. In large part, “12 Years a Slave” is an argument about American slavery that, in image after image, both reveals it as a system (signified in one scene by the sights and ominous, mechanical sounds of a boat water wheel) and demolishes its canards, myths and cherished symbols. There are no lovable masters here or cheerful slaves. There are also no messages, wagging fingers or final-act summations or sermons. Mr. McQueen’s method is more effective and subversive because of its primarily old-fashioned, Hollywood-style engagement.
It’s a brilliant strategy that recognizes the seductions of movies that draw you wholly into their narratives and that finds Mr. McQueen appropriating the very film language that has been historically used to perpetuate reassuring (to some) fabrications about American history. One of the shocks of “12 Years a Slave” is that it reminds you how infrequently stories about slavery have been told on the big screen, which is why it’s easy to name exceptions, like Richard Fleischer’s demented, at times dazzling 1975 film, “Mandingo.” The greater jolt, though, is that “12 Years a Slave” isn’t about another Scarlett O’Hara, but about a man who could be one of those anonymous, bent-over black bodies hoeing fields in the opening credits of “Gone With the Wind,” a very different “story of the Old South.”
At one point in Northup’s memoir, which was published a year after “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and eight years before the start of the Civil War, he interrupts an account of his own near-lynching to comment on the man largely to blame for the noose around his neck. “But whatever motive may have governed the cowardly and malignant tyrant,” he writes, “it is of no importance.” It doesn’t matter why Northup was strung up in a tree like a dead deer in the summer sun, bathed in sweat, with little water to drink. What matters is what has often been missing among the economic, social and cultural explanations of American slavery and in many of its representations: human suffering. “My wrists and ankles, and the cords of my legs and arms began to swell, burying the rope that bound them into the swollen flesh.”
Part of the significance of Northup’s memoir is its description of everyday life. Mr. McQueen recreates, with texture and sweep, scenes of slavery’s extreme privations and cruelties, but also its work rhythms and routines, sunup to sundown, along with the unsettling intimacies it produced among the owners and the owned. In Louisiana, Solomon is sold by a brutish trader (Paul Giamatti) to an outwardly decent plantation owner, William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), who, in turn, sells him to a madman and drunk, Edwin Epps (Mr. Fassbender). In his memoir, Northup refers to Ford charitably, doubtless for the benefit of the white readers who were the target of his abolitionist appeal. Freed from that burden, the filmmakers can instead show the hypocrisies of such paternalism.
It’s on Epps’s plantation that “12 Years a Slave” deepens, and then hardens. It’s also where the existential reality of what it meant to be enslaved, hour after hour, decade after decade, generation after generation, is laid bare, at times on the flayed backs of Epps’s human property, including that of his brutalized favorite, Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o). Mr. Fassbender, skittish and weirdly spiderlike, grabs your attention with curdled intensity. He’s so arresting that at first it seems as if the performance will soon slip out of Mr. McQueen’s control, and that the character will become just another irresistibly watchable, flamboyant heavy. Movie villainy is so easy, partly because it allows actors to showboat, but also because a lot of filmmakers can’t resist siding with power.
Mr. McQueen’s sympathies are as unqualified as his control. There is much to admire about “12 Years a Slave,” including the cleareyed, unsentimental quality of its images — this is a place where trees hang with beautiful moss and black bodies — and how Mr. Ejiofor’s restrained, open, translucent performance works as a ballast, something to cling onto, especially during the frenzies of violence. These are rightly hard to watch and bring to mind the startling moment in “Maus,” Art Spiegelman’s cartoon opus about the Holocaust, in which he asks his “shrink” to explain what it felt like to be in Auschwitz. “Boo! It felt like that. But ALWAYS!” The genius of “12 Years a Slave” is its insistence on banal evil, and on terror, that seeped into souls, bound bodies and reaped an enduring, terrible price.
“12 Years a Slave” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Slave-trade violence.
12 Years a Slave
Opens on Friday in Los Angeles and Manhattan.
Directed by Steve McQueen; written by John Ridley, based on the book by Solomon Northup; director of photography, Sean Bobbitt; edited by Joe Walker; music by Hans Zimmer; production design by Adam Stockhausen; costumes by Patricia Norris; produced by Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Bill Pohlad, Mr. McQueen, Arnon Milchan and Anthony Katagas; released by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 14 minutes.
WITH: Chiwetel Ejiofor (Solomon Northup), Michael Fassbender (Edwin Epps), Benedict Cumberbatch (Ford), Paul Dano (Tibeats), Garret Dillahunt (Armsby), Paul Giamatti (Freeman), Scoot McNairy (Brown), Lupita Nyong’o (Patsey), Adepero Oduye (Eliza), Sarah Paulson (Mistress Epps), Brad Pitt (Bass), Michael Kenneth Williams (Robert), Alfre Woodard (Mistress Shaw), Chris Chalk (Clemens), Taran Killam (Hamilton) and Bill Camp (Radburn).
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