12 Years a Slave

Cynical film-goers decry Hollywood's apparent obsession with race. Can't an awards season pass without another movie on Civil Rights or Jim Crow? Certainly the recent proliferation of race-themed dramas - Red Tails, 42, The Butler - shows Hollywood moving past its reticence to show history through black eyes. We also have biopics of Nelson Mandela and (reportedly) Martin Luther King Jr. in the pipeline, hopefully more substantial works.

But this obscures a festering blind spot. Slavery remains too raw and brutal to make comfortable viewing, immune to the Civil Rights Movement's increasingly anodyne treatment. Some films elide the topic: Lincoln examines the 16th President's struggle to pass the 13th Amendment, keeping blacks discretely sidelined. While Django Unchained does make an ex-slave its protagonist, it's an unrepentantly goofy neo-blaxploitation flick. Thirty-six years after Roots, is a serious slavery film out of the question?

Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave (2013) answers a resounding no. The director of indy favorites Shame and Hunger transitions effectively to historical epic. Unsparing in tackling America's greatest historical sin, it's a haunting cinematic experience.

12 Years a Slave draws on the autobiography of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Northup is a freeman  in 1840s New York, successful in business and respected for musical talent. Until one day he's waylaid by two smooth-talking travelers who shanghai him into bondage. Northup is shipped south and renamed "Platt," purchased by Master Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch) until his gets the best of him. Platt next (Michael Fassbender), a brutal man tormented by his attraction to slave girl Patsy (Lupita Nyong'o) and his domineering wife (Sarah Paulson). Northup tries to retain his identity, even as escape becomes a dim hope.

12 Years a Slave is a class production. McQueen's direction is both artistically elliptical and carefully composed; he jumps from scenes without clear transition, relating chunks of story through inference or belated flashbacks. He effectively contrasts picturesque cotton fields and mansions with dirty slave dwellings and squalid violence. Hans Zimmer's score is unusually restrained, trading blockbuster bombast for reflective, moody strings.

McQueen and writer John Ridley avoid a clear narrative, sprinkling expository flashbacks between colorful episodes. The story moves through upstate New York, Washington, New Orleans and rural Louisiana, stopping for odd asides. Northup encounters a band of traveling Indians and later murderous slave hunters in the woods near his plantation. These vignettes also allow for sharp character sketches, like Paul Giamatti's piratical slave trader. "My sentimentality extends the length of a coin!" he claims while breaking apart Eliza's (Adepuro Oduye) family.

Such bleak humor doesn't undermine Slave's disturbing portrait. McQueen shows slavery as a regimen of humiliation, dehumanizing slaves by stripping them for market, forcing them to dance and beating them as punishment. When Eliza weeps after losing her children, her mistress (Liza J. Bennett) coldly suggests she'll forget them after a warm meal. Implicit everywhere is casual violence, from whippings to a lynching by angry overseer John (Paul Dano). Ford saves Northup from John, yet seems no more sympathetic for it. He still dominates Northup's life, his slaves' fate dangling on a personal whim.

In contrast to the genteel Ford, Epps is a distinctly Freudian villain. He ravishes Patsy but is publicly humiliated by his wife, who browbeats him into punishing his lover. He'd be pathetic if his actions weren't so disgusting. McQueen demolishes the planter class's pretensions to nobility; between their sexual dysfunction and quickness to violence, they're rednecks in expensive clothes. McQueen highlights slavery's inequities as the result not of evil individuals but a monstrous system.

Possibly Slave's most disquieting feature is its bleakness. What Lincoln and Django Unchained share, if nothing else, is their triumphant conclusions: Lincoln ends slavery, Django kills his tormentors. Northup entertains escape but surviving proves hard enough. The slave-owners break families apart and play other slaves against each other favors, preventing any racial solidarity. After Northup survives John's wrath, he dangles for hours while other slaves toil in the background. The ending should be happy but feels muted, heavily qualified. Real life doesn't follow the dictates of the Classic Hollywood Narrative.

Chiwetel Ejiofor already has Oscar buzz for this role, and with good reason. On paper Solomon could be a dull character, forced to sublimate his intelligence and resentment in a nightmare situation. But Ejiofor provides simmering, indelible intensity, letting emotion bleed through his subservient facade. Northup never loses his personality, even while subjected to dehumanizing cruelty. It's a layered turn, neither meek Uncle Tom nor abolitionist avenger, that Ejiofor sells brilliantly.

Benedict Cumberbatch gets the meatiest secondary role, allowing Ford glimmers of sympathy while retaining impenetrable hauteur. Michael Fassbender makes a low key monster destroyed by personal weakness. Newcomer Lupita Nyong'o gives a heartbreaking turn, driven near to madness by an endless parade of torments. Alfre Woodward plays a fiery house slave who escapes servitude by marrying her master. Only Brad Pitt's cameo as an abolitionist feels out of place. 

If 12 Years a Slave isn't entirely satisfying, it's because Solomon Northup's story lacks easy catharsis. It is a beautifully-shot, disturbingly rendered mood piece, confronting slavery more directly than any film in memory.