Completely blown away by 12 Years a Slave

No matter what happens at the Oscars tonight, and I'm predicting it will win best picture, best director, best supporting actress, best adapted screenplay, I was completely and absolutely blown away yesterday by 12 Years a Slave - entirely mesmerized throughout the film from first to last moment, well, that's not exactly true because I couldn't even watch the last moments as I sat in the theater, I'm not ashamed to say, and sobbed like a baby. Just an incredibly moving and sorrowful movie, told with great emotion and feeling and scope - sure, maybe a little over the top at times and, yes, this is not the first time we've seen the horrors of slavery on screen or on TV (remember Roots, the first great TV miniseries that had the whole country focused on this topic for weeks on end in the 1980s, I think), and yes a few of the elements of the film seem a little unlikely, even if it is based on a true narrative - hard to fully accept Solomon's complete naivete at the outset, when he follows two hustlers to D.C., and you have to wonder why there was not a more thorough search for him if he was truly such an established community figure in Saratoga, but laying all that aside, the movie is frightening and horrifying like a nightmare, well acted in every single role in my opinion - looking back on it I feel especially sad for those - Giamstti, Fassbender, et al. - who had to portray those horrible white Southerners, that must have been painful to do. More than any movie I've ever seen, 12 Years shows how the institution of slavery corrupted every moral value of the South, and maybe of the nation - these awful scenes of the young white gentry enjoying a masked ball while the slaves play the fiddle - those are as horrifying as the more brutal scenes of whipping, lynching. Of course this all is made more poignant in that we know that the main character is an educated, skilled, free man with a family back in New York - it's not a story of a "typical" slave born into slavery. If that makes it easier for us to ID with the protagonist, so be it - but it's equally clear that he suffers in the end knowing he may have escaped what so many continue to endure. Inevitably, this movie made me recall our visit to the amazing Rhett House in Charleston, where you can see first-hand the way the slaves lived in squalor next the lavish life of the "masters" - made all the more poignant because the house, at least, now, is a cobwebbed ruin (except for the gallery, where you can see the crappy "art" that the family bought on their many trips to Europe, including a statue, "First Tears," of a little boy crying over the body of a dead rabbit - I literally though I was going to vomit and had to leave the room - impossible to tell if the Charlestown Heritage Society understands that the gallery may be the most awful room in the museum). That said, it's impossible to leave 12 Years without being moved, disturbed, maybe changed - much like a visit to Auschwitz or a Holocaust museum, I imagine, though to date I have avoided any such visit.