Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is a very shocking and unpleasant film to watch. It captures the horrors of slavery far more directly and luridly than any film I can think of. Watching it, one is amazed by the realization that honest and well-crafted depictions of American slave experience are so incredibly rare, especially compared to the number of honest and well-crafted holocaust films that are turned out each and every year. Put simply, 12 Years a Slave is a film that’s long overdue, one that every American should see. If it wins the Oscar, and I’m sure it will, it will be well-deserved, within the context of its likely competitors.

What impressed me the most was not the various and interminable scenes of breathtaking cruelty, but the exquisite way this film is put together. There is simply not a false note anywhere in any of the performances, with Michael Fassbender a particular standout. And the film brilliantly captures the sense of place – the look of the fields, the swampland, the plantation, and the incredible feeling of geographic isolation – without ever seeming to ram “period details” down the viewers’ throats, a rare accomplishment indeed. This is a beautifully directed film, paced extremely well, with elegant scene transitions, and featuring very realistic-sounding dialog. And the story of Solomon Northup’s ordeal is consistently exciting.

With that said, 12 Years a Slave is not the kind of film you would ever need or want to watch again, lacking qualities destined to deepen on repeated viewing. This is partly the price McQueen pays for placing so much emphasis on his “shock and awe” depiction of slavery’s horrors. But there is also a certain intellectual superficiality to this film. It’s very much a film of images, and in retrospect there was not a single idea or piece of dialog from the film that actually stuck with me. The slaves don’t say much to each other. Solomon Northup and his various masters talk a little, but its always very focused on crude realism. The white people hardly talk at all. Many would argue that this is simply part of the brilliance of the film, essential to the spell of realism it casts, and I would agree with that to a certain extent. But the downside is that it makes for a film that is not all that interesting, beyond the visceral impact of the first viewing.

There is serious talk right now that 12 Years a Slave might re-ignite racial tensions in the United States. I find this indescribably sad, but what are we to expect? McQueen is tossing out all this explosive content in what is essentially an idealess film, divorced from any historical consideration of slavery, race, capitalism and class oppression in the United States. At least films like Amistad, Amazing Grace, Lincoln and even that hackneyed mess Glory, dealt with slavery as a historical phenomenon subject to courageous social change, and a film like The Whistleblower (2011) dealing with unresolved, present-day slavery is even more artistically valuable, exploring the nature of the corporate and political power structures which perpetuate such abominations. In contrast, 12 Years a Slave is pulling out all the stops to convince us that slaves actually had it bad in 19th century America. Who’s the target audience for this film, the Klu Klux Klan?

I’d recommend seeing 12 Years a Slave for a good story, beautifully filmed and very well-told. But I must say I came away from this film a bit traumatized, strangely dazzled by its pyrotechnics, but also vaguely unsatisfied. I think a Costa-Gavras type filmmaker could have found a way (with brilliantly crafted dialog) to simultaneously say something intelligent about how the historical entanglement of slavery and American capitalism relates to subsequent race and class issues which to this day mar the sociopolitical landscape of the United States. In this way art would be used to arrive at a broader, more meaningful truth about slavery, rather than to simply recreate (albeit perfectly) the literal happenings that constituted it day-to-day. 12 Years a Slave may easily be the most emotionally wrenching film you see this year, and perhaps the most visually arresting, but on the spectrum of socially and politically conscious film art, it falls short in some critically important areas.