Forget the much-hyped but heavily fictionalized and seriously flawed “The Butler.” Steve McQueen’s magnificent “12 Years a Slave,” which had its star-studded Toronto International Film Festival at the Princess of Wales Theatre Friday night, is the one to beat come Oscar night.
“12 Years,” which got a standing ovation from the enthralled audience, totally lives up to early buzz that it would be the “Schindler’s List” of slavery movies — an often difficult to watch but totally unforgettably true story of a free black musician from upstate New York who is abducted and sold into slavery in 1841 Georgia.
At the very least, Chiewetel Ejiofor (“Kinky Boots”) leads the Best Actor race for his stunning performance as Solomon Northrup — separated from his family and forced to hide his indignation as well as his education simply to survive as he is put to backbreaking work on plantations.
McQueen, who is black, doesn’t stint on graphic depictions of beatings, hangings and other forms of brutality and cruelty — and you can’t shrug a second of it off like you could for an action cartoon like “Django Unchained.”
The peerless cast includes Michael Fassbender — who played a sex addict in McQueen’s “Shame” — as Northrup’s second, more racist and sadistic master (the ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch is Northrup’s first, more enlightened master who is forced to sell him after he whups sadistic overseer Paul Dano in an entirely deserved fit of rage).
Paul GIamatti turns up as an unctuous slave dealer and co-producer Brad Pitt has a two-scene cameo as a Canadian abolitionist (this got a big cheer in Toronto) who risks his life to help Northrup escape. But the other standout in the cast is Lupita Nyong’o as a hard-working, cotton-picking slave who is also forced to become Fassbender’s mistress, much to the fury of his wife (Sarah Paulson, a stage regular who has never had a role half this good in her previous movies).
Ejiofor and Nyong’o share a shocking scene together that many people will have to watch through their fingers. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they’re reunited many times along the road to the Oscars. Among other things, it will be difficult to look at “Gone With the Wind” as quite so romantic again.