Mollie Hemingway:
The film “12 Years A Slave” was easily the critics’ favorite last year. It just won the Golden Globe for Best Drama and will surely be nominated for and win many more awards. On Rotten Tomatoes, which aggregates film reviews, the film has positive reviews from 93 percent of viewers and a whopping 98 percent of top critics. It’s not just that it’s good but that there is so little bad in it. If you have a strong enough stomach for visual depictions of unspeakably brutal violence, you likely will not regret seeing this movie. The source material, a memoir of one man’s enslavement, is straightforward. The acting is great.
So don’t let the bullying from progressive critics or the lame protests from theprofessionally outraged dissuade you from seeing the film. To judge from box office receipts, people have been dissuaded. Or, at least, the film is not being seen by many. While someone at Salon thought the movie was “one of the most popular” of last year, that was not true. It was actually ranked 75th. As Jonathan Last pointed out, that means it was less popular than “42,” “The Smurfs 2,” “Jurassic Park 3D” and “A Haunted House.”
But the critical reception of the film also demonstrates a dramatic change in critics’ appreciation for violence in movies. When my husband and I viewed the movie, I found it almost unbearable to watch. It reminded me of my response to “The Passion of the Christ,” the visceral 2004 film about the suffering and death of Jesus. Both films are very good. Both films are depictions of real people in history. Both films are full not just of violence but violence that must be depicted because it serves the central point. And both films deal profoundly with the effects of human sinfulness.
Perhaps you’ll be as intrigued as I was in seeing the difference in critical reception not just for the films but also on the specific point of violence.
Here’s the Rotten Tomatoes summary for “12 Years A Slave“:
The blurb, in case you didn’t catch it: “It’s far from comfortable viewing, but 12 Years a Slave’s unflinchingly brutal look at American slavery is also brilliant — and quite possibly essential — cinema.”
Now let’s look at “The Passion of the Christ“:
Unlike “12 Years a Slave,” “The Passion of the Christ” was wildly popular despite being in Aramaic and Latin — the third-most popular in 2004, coming in only behind the sequels in the Shrek and Spider-Man series. Its domestic receipts were more than $370 million. And even for that level of popularity, it had 81 percent positive reviews from viewers. If you look at the top-three grossing films each year since then, many don’t get that many positive reviews from viewers. Those that did — “Iron Man,” “The Dark Knight,” “Avatar,” “Toy Story 3,” “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2,” “Marvel’s The Avengers,” “The Dark Knight Rises,” “The Hunger Games,” “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” “Despicable Me 2” — also received favorable reviews from the professional critics.
But check out that top critics rating for “The Passion of the Christ”: only 37 percent. “The Passion of the Christ” also received no major Oscar nominations. Whereas critics were much more favorable to the other hit films that year relative to the general audience (see Shrek 2 and Spider-Man 2), this was a move in the opposite direction. Dramatically in the opposite direction. And check out that blurb: “The graphic details of Jesus’ torture make the movie tough to sit through and obscure whatever message it is trying to convey.”
I went ahead and looked at what top critics had to say for both movies. The comparison and contrast is intriguing. The snippets from these reviews show the vast majority of publications and critics evolved on the violence issue. Whereas many claimed they objected to “The Passion of the Christ” on the grounds of the violence it portrayed, many critics also claimed that the violent depiction of slavery was what made “12 Years A Slave” such a great film.
San Jose Mercury News
Passion: The extreme violence does not teach a lesson; it’s an end in itself, more suited to the S&M crowd than to anyone seeking an uplifting sermon on everlasting redemption.
Slave: This is not medicine for America to swallow; it’s filmmaking of the highest caliber.
Detroit News (same critic)
Passion: A filmed bloodletting like no other on record, essentially a terribly graphic two-hour torture sequence.
Slave: “12 Years a Slave” lays out an institution so twisted and wrong that its honest portrayal has been avoided for centuries. Yes, it’s dark and brutal. It needs to be.
Boston Globe (same critic)
Passion: A profoundly medieval movie, yes. Brutal almost beyond powers of description, yes. More obsessed with capturing every holy drop of martyr’s blood and sacred gobbet of flesh than with any message of Christian love, yes.
Slave: “12 Years a Slave” isn’t the story of an American tragedy. It’s the story of the American tragedy — this country’s original sin….“12 Years a Slave” is to the “peculiar institution” what “Schindler’s List” was to the Holocaust: a work that, finally, asks a mainstream audience to confront the worst of what humanity can do to itself… This movie is this country’s Schindler’s list in that it takes this traumatic event that is crucial to the understanding in this case of our country and its history and shows it to us in a way that a movie has never really done before in a way that has impact that forces you to really think about what this country did and what it was founded on and what it was built on.
