Review: 12 YEARS A SLAVE

A well-to-do New York musician is tempted by a lucrative touring gig, dined, and wined and wined more before waking up in chains and transported to the south and sold to a plantation owner as a slave. Oh, the musician is black and it antebellum USA. Not nice. As the title gives it away, he lives for a long time this way and is either freed by paperwork or death in the end. Apart from a slight blend of tenses at the start to allow us a view on his citizenship's ownership we get a representation of a time line for a long time. Linear, is the word.

I remember coming out of Casino with a frown. The reason I loved Goodfellas and was unmoved by the later film was this patchwork linearity which all but prevented sufficient motion between the screen and the audience to allow for some empathy. I saw the artistry but couldn't care less. 12 Years a Slave doesn't have this effect and it took me until after the credits rolled to work out why. It has to do with the work of another great director whose influence is signalled in the first minutes of screen time.

First, a little about why I like this director. I am yet to see his debut feature Hunger but what I've heard of it is borne well through his second, Shame. In the latter film a slight premise is examined as much through mise en scene as it is through dialogue and performances. This works to such an extent that it allows for a greater reliance on the blend of look, performance and speech than in even the more edgy of mainstream fare. As a cinema experience it lies somewhere between a series of tableaux and a conventional narrative film. Director Steve McQueen began as much of an installation artist as a filmmaker. This might remind the cinestorians among ye of David Lynch but for once in comparing one director to a favourite of mine I'm not thinking of him.

After we fade in from the various corporate badges we are in a field of tall green cane. A middleaged man dressed for warm weather is demonstrating how to use a cane knife. His accent obscures his words so much that he sounds like he's imitating bird life. Reverse shot reveals a group of twenty or so young black men and women in plain sack like clothing. There is fear in their eyes. The overseer is hard to understand yet they will face pain if they don't do as he says. A young affluent white couple observe. Slavery.

Six unsubmerssible units later (with a few necessary joins) we are sitting through the credits. With me? We are Kubrick's film about slavery.

This is not a tribute by McQueen. If there were quotes from Full Metal Jacket I didn't notice them. This is even more than influence; it is applied Kubrick. At each stage of Solomon/Platt's mental double life as an educated observer and humanity-stripped victim we are led through scenes that filter mainstream convention through an alien eye, recreated history that is less realistic than it is interesting. There is a frightening undercurrent to the opening scene described above and we share the fear by feeling the starkness of the situation: there is no sentimentality to cloud or comfort.

The thing is that McQueen has come to this through hard work rather than film school. He has arrived here rather than aspired to a share of glory and this is the difference between understanding and plagiarism: a Tarrantino likes showing off; McQueen has a job to do. The practicality of applying Kubrick to a long linear narrative is that the force of the artifice allows a more objective involvement than with more regular fare.

Spielberg failed in the comparable Schindler's List by insisting on character polarity which he took to counterproductive lengths: Schindler was so reprobate that his newfound humanitarianism seems engineered and Amon Goeth is so charming, boyish and violent he becomes far more attractive as a screen presence. The "one more" speech of the former is thus rendered as believable as an oscar speech against totalitarianism and Goeth's unceremonious dispatch is warmly funny.

Here, Ford, the first plantation owner, is shown as benign but only within his system, he is a kinder slave owner who seems never to have doubted his right to forced labour. Epps, who might have been Speilberg's villain, is here a man whose enjoyment of his own power and near unrestrained surrender to his own biology make him a spoiled brat with a cattle whip. The fact that his vulnerability shows in the ingested tenderness when drunk or poignantly when he lifts his illegitimate daughter to his side with the pleasure of a parent are enough to tell us, more importantly than a scene staging his good side, that he does not perceive any fault in himself. That is instructive. It doesn't take a grandstanding scene to show that Tibeats' bullying is borne of his knowledge of his mediocrity as a tradesman, it's folded into the flow and we have no trouble seeing it.

These are people whose historical circumstances do not compel them to be essentially good or bad but to expect them to act against their personal architecture would be our fault. This would change if the film were more conventional and we'd expect more of a psyche test for each player but here we witness nature plus culture and it is for us to understand rather than condemn. Drill Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket is not a bad guy, he's a drill sergeant, he has to be like that: Epps is a living nightmare but you can see why.

Chiwetel Ejiofor at the centre shows us Solomon's acceptance of the contradiction forced upon him. His early heroic declaration that he doesn't want to survive but live undergoes a rapid expansion of definition as soon as his captivity becomes slavery. His struggle is to keep Solomon alive within the shell of Platt (the identity assigned him by his captors) despite not knowing if he will ever be able to free the man within. The various failures and successes he observes around him in the press of the coercive life that victimises them are atomised and incommunicative. Solomon must stay as still as a mouse playing dead while Platt functions. Which one is life and which mere survival? Not always easy to tell when the suppressed one might never be wanted by the world again. His moments of action have consequences (including an excruciating sequence which feels like forever and made more unnerving for all the life that surrounds it) that allow us to withhold our judgement on him for hiding his true self. Finally, because of this, we feel for him with our minds before our hearts; we feel for him more profoundly than we would in something more mainstream.

Like Schindler's List, 12 Years a Slave is offered knowing its audience agrees with it. The test for any such work is how extensive is its reach beyond its setting. Nazis are bad, can you be a good person under their rule? Slavery is bad, how do you keep your humanity? Etc etc. Solomon lives as Platt the same as dissidents in Stalin's Russia or Pran in The Killing Fields. Because of this 12 Years a Slave is curiously closer to John Frankenheimer's Seconds or Roman Polanski's The Pianist than Schindler's List as it does not flinch from the effect of its historical moment upon its characters (all of its characters) even to flirt with sentimentality. There's no point in declaring McQueen a new Kubrick. I think he's a cleverer artist than that. But, boy, if you wanted to know how Stanley saw slavery ...

Review: Shame: Oblomov as a sex addict

Brandon wakes to the cool light of morning swathed in sheets of such a rarefied blue-grey that their colour must have a name like Murchison. For a long screen minute he gazes into space. He sleeps naked. It's just the cotton and he.

Any teacher of creative writing will tell you about character keynotes: gestures, utterances etc that establish them from the get go. Major Jack Stormbahn enters a debate about the ethics of a surprise attack and barks: "Smoke 'em!" Trudence Farrow fluffs the kind of small decision that will become a life-and-death one later. Brandon stares into the light in front of him without a blink. He is either void of thought or possessed by thoughts that haunt him every second of every day. It's an eerie opening.

He gets up and turns the day's switches on, shower, teeth, dressing, walking around the featureless corner between rooms as his answering machine plays out some pain: another woman has mistaken him for a viable life partner. He listens as though it's the breakfast show.

Work is all open neck shirts and open plan. The boss is a good guy and the colleagues rag each other in such a low key fashion that you know their competition is serious and seething. When you see suits in this office it's clear that they are clients. This is not the generic yuppie stockbrocker firm of this kind of tale. Brandon works at something altogether more intimidating than that. He gets out of the morning meeting, goes to the gents, wipes the immaculately janitored seat and masturbates. Hang on, rewind.

Stuttering through this is a series of snippets of his train ride into town. He sits across from a radiant young beauty and gazes at her. After avoiding it she gives in and gazes back, her smile at the power of this attraction uncontrollable. When the scene spreads out and plays for itself the pair are locked into this wordless seduction. The music is high emotion, sweeping strings in a minor key. It's big enough for a battle scene. But there's something wrong here (see it to find out why). She gets off at the next stop (he is standing close enough behind her for their bodies to touch) and loses him in the throng of the station. He pursues futilely. His self-maintenance in the cubicle tell us how successfully he has cast the incident from his mind.

Back home he opens his front door to expensive prostitutes. His laptop is always on and always connected, its hard drive engorged with jpgs, videos and camgirls. The paradise of a man who has leaped from thirteen to thirty-five without stopping for lunch. It is closeted, narcissistic and male.It is violated, according to his central nervous system, with an invasion by his sister. Their reunion is combative and unsettling.

Life goes on but with an increasing strain as her physical and emotional slovenliness stuffs its way into every corner of his inner sanctum. She's always on the phone, pleading with someone else who finally found her too irritating to bear. She's a singer and performs at a club the night he takes his boss out.

Her performance of the standard New York New York is shown in an almost unbroken close-up that depicts every nervously anticipated cue. She goes for a Marylin Monroe "Happy Birthday , Mr President" feel. The pianist keeps trying to break it out into Broadway but she can't let go of the driftwood of coyness she started with. And the song in its entirety grinds on to its tiny whimpering death. Brandon is embarrassed by it but his boss can't take his eyes off her and claps like he's just seen a resurrected Billie Holiday. Later, back at his apartment, the sound of the pair's foreplay drives Brandon insane. He might be a sex addict but no junkie likes seeing anyone else fit up. He goes for a jog.

As his private empire of self-gratification has now been exposed to the elements, Brandon's response is like any other addict's, more of the good stuff. More prostitutes, more pickups. When he tries for something more substantial his failure is a profound self-confrontation. He doesn't like what he finally can't look away from and ... goes for more of the easy stuff.

You know where this is going. I know where this is going. We all know where it's going but it's still hard to look away. And it keeps digging deeper. Helping our own compulsion are performances both nuanced and intense. Michael Fassbender, his beauty both earthy and sophisticated, shows a man whose chief skill in life seems to be the masking of intense emotional pain. Carey Mulligan as his sister, Sissy, is at a constant teeter between disassembly and mania. They are both constantly needy and greedy having both come from an emotional isolation tank of a family, the privileged equivalent of Harry Harlow's laboratory.

But as cold as the character's might get (and they do, rugged up against their personal winters as much as the one sinking the mercury around them) these performances allow us in and we follow with a fascinated gaze.

Brandon administers the self-anihillating dosage common to all addicts. His might well be the endorphin rush of orgasm rather than an injection or the next shot of booze but it looks like addiction. When he masturbates there is no joy in the thievery of the moment nor even some solemn appeasement of an erotic idol. It's like watching an alcoholic lick the whisky spill on the tabletop, machine-like, action+action=result.

This is the Manhattan Alpha planet where Patrick Bateman once roamed, tearing into the soft and perfect skin around him. But then the towers came down and the dollar went psycho and the light of even the most refined of the one percent has a grime and borrowed feel to it. The brilliant icy sheen of the New York buildings that fill the windows of the lofty offices and apartments is like wallpaper in this tale of hopeless detachment. This feature comes into play later when he must process a life-changing shock and those towers dwarf him like adult strangers around a lost child.

Shame is an intensely cinematic film whose power is only thinly covered by its steady restraint the same way as David Cronenberg's Crash or Neil La Bute's In the Company of Men. It's only February but I think I've seen one of my top five of 2012.