Movie audiences have never been presented with anything quite like the intertwined beauty and savagery of "12 Years a Slave," so it's anyone's guess whether they'll extend the embrace that Steve McQueen's film deserves. Such is the power of this landmark event, though, that it seems certain to transcend the movie realm and become a new reference point in contemporary culture—a defining vision of what slavery looked like, and felt like, in the U.S. before the Civil War.
It's a sun-scorched vision of hell that puts Hieronymus Bosch in the shade. At the same time—and here's the genius of the production, and of John Ridley's script—it's a thrilling tale of survival, based on a celebrated 1853 memoir by Solomon Northup. A free black man living happily and prosperously with his wife and children in Saratoga, N.Y., Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is pulled into a nightmare world when he is abducted by bounty hunters in 1841, then shipped off to a plantation in Louisiana as a slave in shackles and chains.
At first the educated, sweet-spirited victim doesn't realize what's happening to him, but he's brought all too quickly to understand the ruthlessness of slave traders who treat the men, women and children they sell as talking livestock—"My sentimentality," says a pitiless trader played by Paul Giamatti, "extends the length of a coin"—and the inhumanity of plantation owners who buy them. "There is no sin," says one owner, Edwin Epps, a lust-addled, Scripture-quoting brute played by Michael Fassbender. "A man does how he pleases with his property."
Like its source material, "12 Years a Slave" is a polemic, and a furious one. How could it not be, given the physical horror and moral squalor of the society it explores? Solomon's agonies—the lashings, the capricious beatings—are barely endurable for him, and a test of our willingness to bear witness, even though it's hard to turn away from the astonishing range and impassioned conviction of Mr. Ejiofor's portrayal. A slave named Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o, in another of the film's brilliant performances) endures even more terrible punishment at the hands of Epps, whose tortured sexuality leads him to rape her ritually, and to have her whipped until the flesh falls from her back.
The polemic is also a work of art. Mr. McQueen was a visual artist before he became a filmmaker, and he and his cinematographer, Sean Bobbitt, give us a succession of images that seem discovered rather than devised. (In one extended, excruciating sequence that I'll describe obliquely, so as not to diminish its impact, Solomon touches his toes to a patch of mud like a dancer performing a life-or-death gavotte.) The artistry extends to the heightened, almost literary language spoken by the slaves among themselves, and occasionally to their masters; it's a choice that could have fallen into affectation but serves to honor inchoate feelings that might otherwise have gone unexpressed. Yet Mr. Ridley's exemplary script gives everyone his intricate due. The white men and women who inhabit the film aren't all undifferentiated monsters—one can imagine them being tender with their children and generous to their friends—and those of them who perpetrate the most flagrant evil are anything but banal.
Mr. Fassbender shines, however malignantly, as the worst villain of the bunch. Epps is the lethally serious counterpart of the jovial monster played by Christoph Waltz in "Django Unchained," and one more reminder that villainy in drama is its own reward. Benedict Cumberbatch is Ford, a plantation owner with a paternalistic bent; he recognizes Solomon's intellectual and musical gifts and treats him reasonably well, but still sees him as a valuable piece of property. Paul Dano's overseer, Tibeats, is terrifying for his invincible stupidity.
As an emblem of plantation society's contradictions, Alfre Woodard's Mistress Shaw is serenely, almost surreally charming; a black woman and former slave, she is married to a white plantation owner. Brad Pitt's Bass is the antithesis of evil, a Canadian abolitionist who may be the least convincing character in the film because he shows up out of nowhere and delivers the script's only lapse into didacticism. That's easy to forgive on three counts, though: Mr. Pitt is perfectly fine in the role; as one of the producers, he was instrumental in getting "12 Years a Slave" to the screen; and the abolitionist's message of equality is a worthy one. "Your story is amazing," Bass tells Solomon gravely, "and in no way good." The film is amazing, and in every way good.
