How might it look and feel to have lost all personal freedom? To be completely at the mercy, and whim, of another human being? This question forms the cinematic subject of 12 Years a Slave. The answer is not pretty. It’s not even bearable. British art film director Steve McQueen takes it on nonetheless.

And to be sure the film succeeds in offering up horrific scenes of how it—slavery in the American south circa 1850— very likely was.  Hollywood’s down-home stereotypes of the happy dark folk and the benevolent massah are blown to smithereens. The film fails however, despite its insistently right-minded efforts. The repeated scenes of brutality inflicted upon the helpless slaves ultimately deaden the very consciences they are intended to arouse (recall your response to the scenes of Christ at the hands of the Romans in Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ).

12 Years a Slave rests almost entirely on the sturdy shoulders and despairing face of Chiwetel Ejiofor, an actor of clear gifts and appealing presence who simply isn’t given enough to work with. I can’t help but feel that his character—one Solomon Northup, a happily married free man with musical talents, education, and social charm—could have been presented with more dimension. Ejiofor’s face seems to register a single eloquenty mono-expression of existential disbelief—how in God’s name could this have happened to me?

Perhaps it is McQueen’s intention to show us that at some point during sustained psychological and physical torture, humans retreat into numbed animality, capable only of staring into a bewildering and deadening future. But it doesn’t further our understanding of how Northup managed to maintain his sanity, and sense of self identity while others slipped away. We see him as a cypher, the EverySlave at the center of an orgy of brutality, human trafficking, and the unspeakable agony of bondage. Yet somehow his ability to negotiate his own survival eludes us. Peripheral characters often provide more emotional traction, especially the slave owners and their petty, soulless plantation managers.

Paul Dano, for example, is riveting as a sadist of small imagination and huge resentment. With his weasel mouth and desperate eyes, he radiates the petty anger of a man without prospects. As the slightly mad, entirely malevolent mistress of the Epps plantation where Northup ends up, Sarah Paulson is manic caprice in antique satin.

Northup is first sold onto the plantation of a compassionate farmer named Ford, played by a restrained Benedict Cumberbatch. Threatened by Northup’ss educational superiority, Dano’s character grows homocidal and Cumberbatch reluctantly hands his prize slave over to cotton baron and mercurial sadist Edwin Epps, played with relentless precision by Michael Fassbender.

A novella could be written about Fassbender’s adroit armory of acting tricks, and for a half hour there is appears that his feverish rages and quicksilver cunning will carry off the entire film. We, along with Northup must mutely watch the cruelty inflicted upon the current object of Epps’ mercurial lust, a courageous young slave called Patsy (Lupita Nyong’o). The brutal beatings are so prolific and redundantly repellent that they amount to both visual and emotional overkill, ultimately inviting the audience to ask, “when will there be some genuine moments of confrontation, of unexpected turnabout?”
It is impossible not to be moved by the plight of Solomon Northup, suddenly torn from a world of civility, personal freedom, and a wife and family to endure unthinkable treatment. Yet, and I risk the wrath of the PC police when I say this, the film was very often boring. Yes, I said boring. The film alternates scenic vistas of the bayous, sunsets, and ethereal Spanish moss-draped magnolias, with muddy pig styes, endless (endless) whippings, long, long reaction shots while faux classical music intones, no insists that these are the “important” moments in the film. There appeared to be no editor on board this project. Photographer Sean Bobbitt wants to have it all, unvarnished squalor enfolded by a tourism poster for Louisiana.
Nothing transformative occurs in this film, little interpretive traction—possibly a predicament that all “true stories” are stuck with. I am being told, insistently, that I must open my eyes to the inhuman conditions of slaves in the years before the Civil War.  No well-told story need stoop to didactic bludgeoning.  12 Years a Slave depicts a descent into hell, a tragic story that simply fails to cohere into a compelling film.