Brad Pitt | Revel In It Mag

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12 Years A Slave is the greatest work of art about slavery that the world has ever known or ever will know. That was my assessment when I first saw the film nearly a month ago, and that’s my assessment now.

It’s taken some time for me to wade through the sea of emotions I felt in the wake of seeing 12 Years A Slave and engaging the critical conversation around it. I saw the movie at an industry screening and Q&A with the film’s director, Steve McQueen, the British fine artist turned filmmaker of African descent who’s previous films are the Michael Fassbinder starrers Hunger and Shame, and three of the film’s stars, the British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, who plays the lead role of Solomon Northrop, the American actress Alfre Woodard who plays a former slaved turned planter’s mistress, and the great discovery of the year, the Kenyan born-Yale educated actress Lupita Ngong’o, who’s riveting turn as the slave Patsey has earned her a place in the acting pantheon. Ms. Woodard rightly tipped her hat as well to her white co-stars, whose courageous work was as essential to McQueen’s accomplishment as was that of the African diaspora stars — representing three continents! — who shared the stage that night. I want to make special note of the work of three of those actors, starting with Benedict Cumberbatch, who’s riding high this moviegoing season with lauded performances in three important films, 12 Years A Slave, The Fifth Estate, and the much anticipated August Osage County, which received a long and rousing standing ovation when I saw it on the Broadway stage. The miracle of Cumberbatch’s work as the slave owning Ford is his ability to imbue his compassionate master with genuine humanity and fellow-feeling towards Northrop, whom he clearly understood as his equal or, as he seemed to understand, his better, but who nonetheless did nothing to restore Northrop to the freedom from which he knew he’d been stolen, opting instead to use Northrop — his property no matter how that came to be — to satisfy his debts.

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In Elle Magazine’s May Women In Music Issue, Lizzy Goodman wrote a profile on Kim Gordon, founder and singer/songwriter/bass and guitar player of Sonic Youth, that put the lie to any notion any of us may have that it’s “too late,” that our opportunities have passed us by, that the choices we made in the early days of our youth have locked us in, like cement, that we aren’t still perfectly free to make a glorious, noise for the next decades of our lives. She’s a reminder to rock on until the stone’s rolled over our grave or our bodies are set ablaze, whichever the case may be, and an exemplar of what it looks like, in the words of Fleetwood Mac, to “handle the seasons of [our] li[ves].”

Gordon at 59 has started a new band, is painting like a fiend, and she’s dating again, being squired about by younger men, a restauranteur, actor and architect among them, following the end of he long marriage to Thurston Moore, her Sonic Youth co-founder and bandmate, and father of her young adult daughter Coco. The marriage ended as these things sometimes do — a midlife crisis, an affair with another woman, counseling, Thurston’s unwillingness, or inability, to leave the other woman so as to knit his family back into a piece. Gordon is honest about the toll this loss took, and it’s her honesty that makes this next turn of her professional and personal screw so instructive for the many of us who, having taken a hit or two by the time we were 30 or 40 or 50 or so, wonder not so much how we can get back up and keep going — there’s something innate in the human survival instinct that allows us to do that — but how we can rise like a phoenix from the ash and set this world ablaze.

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Tag Archives: Brad Pitt

Why 12 Years A Slave Is
The Greatest Work On
Slavery The World Has Known

Kim Gordon & How To Rock On
At Every Age