2013 Muriels: Best Lead Performance (Male)

Here it is, folks - the closest race of the year. How much of a photo finish was this? We initially were ready to crown the second-place finisher as the victor before a standard double-check revealed that we goofed and misallocated a couple points. Heart-in-mouth squeaker, this one.

Third place:



Joaquin Phoenix, Her [146 points / 24 votes]

Second place:



Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf of Wall Street [191 points / 29 votes]

And your winner...



Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave [192 points / 31 votes]

"Watch any awards ceremony, and you'll see an actor talk about “the journey” - the trip they have taken inside the life and mind of a character during the short amount of time it took to make a movie. As an analogy, it's a nice turn of phrase - poetic, a little soft - suggesting an almost leisurely commitment picked up and set aside upon completion. But it veils the reality of that commitment: that the near total immersion within the life of another engenders some very real, very powerful, emotional states with lasting, if not permanent, psychological, and spiritual consequences. In 12 Years a Slave, Chiwetel Ejiofor steps into the shoes of Solomon Northup and delivers a performance that is not only breathtaking in its complexity and power but that is also, quite literally, a journey into the darker underbelly of the human condition.

At the the beginning of the film, Solomon Northup is a free man, an American citizen in right and deed. He walks the streets secure in his citizenship, bearing an intelligent eye, a open smile, and a wardrobe just a bit shy of that of a dandy. He loves his family, loves his life, and knows that his place within the machinery of the American Dream is safe and sound. Until it isn't.

A chance encounter, a little alcohol, a little something else, and suddenly, Solomon Northup's American Dream becomes an all too real and all too horrific nightmare. Chained, beaten, sold, Solomon is completely stripped of his identity as a human being. No longer a person, he finds himself a cog in the bowels of that American machine, an object to be used or discarded as someone else sees fit. His intelligence is now his greatest curse, for, in order to survive, it must be sublimated to the will of his new masters. He must witness without being seen to see, experience without being seen to feel, he must survive without being seen to live.

But survival is life, after all, and via the conduit of Ejiofor's performance, Solomon exists with a vibrancy and immediacy that strikes the audience as sharply as a whip across the spine. Solomon's thoughts may be confined, but Ejiofor opens the man's soul and proceeds to give us a guided and enlightening tour. His eyes become our eyes, his consciousness, our conscience. Ejiofor's performance is so expansive, so deep, that an audience not only experiences the visceral horror of his external condition, but empathizes with the internal agony of his tortured psyche. It is a wonderful and terrible thing to behold.

For 12 years, Solomon Northup was a slave. For seven weeks in the summer of 2012, Chiwetel Ejiofor was Solomon Northup. Upon his release, Solomon begins his journey home, once again, a free man. But as the wagon pulls away, and hell continues behind him, Ejiofor's eyes telegraph one final lesson. Like Solomon, he has survived his journey, and is now free to return to the business of living. Only now, however, we too can see the enormity of the lie." -- Donald Carder

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