12 Years a Slave (2013)

Nominated for:  Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Costumes, Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Production Design, and Best Adapted Screenplay    This is one of the big ones to knock off the list.

Get ready to hate me. 

You ready? 

This is totally overrated.

People reacted to this movie like it was the spiritual successor to Schindler's List and it is not.  It lacks the significant emotional heft to stand on the same footing as that film.  Schindler's List pulls you through the wringer of human suffering but, at the end, makes you feel as though it has been done for a purpose.  You feel purified in your catharsis.  12 Years a Slave is simply an endurance test of sadism. 

Solomon Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a well-respected free man living in Saratoga, New York, with his wife and two children, when he is conned into traveling to Washington, D.C.  Once there, he is drugged, shackled, and sold into slavery.  Originally sold to a well-meaning yet still unaware of basic human rights plantation owner named Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), Northrop --renamed Platt-- runs afoul of the overseer (Paul Dano) by being too well educated.  Ford transfers his debt to notoriously cruel cotton farmer, Epps (Michael Fassbender), in order to save Platt from being killed.  Epps is a Bible-thumping drunk with an obsessive streak, especially for a young slave girl named Patsy (Lupita Nyong'o), which pisses off his stone-cold bitch of a wife (Sarah Paulson). Platt must focus on staying alive through his master's capricious whims long enough to find a way to get word of his plight to friends in the North.

This is based on Solomon Northrup's harrowing memoir of the same name.  What the man went through is unspeakably appalling, but the movie would rather spend more time dwelling on each beating he received than offer any sort of insight into how he felt or what he thought.  It was so interested in piling one horrible occurrence after another on its leading man it started to verge into dark comedy. 

I don't want to take away from the performances or from the actors' struggle with the material.  I know from interviews that this was a difficult film for all involved, that they keenly felt the gravity of the source novel.  Fassbender and Ejiofor put their all into their roles and heartily deserve their nominations.  It probably will win Best Picture, but I feel like in ten years people will wonder why.