‘Emancipation‘ Isn’t Will Smith’s Big Redemption Tour. It’s a B-Movie About Slavery
It’s too bad that Will Smith’s new movie, Emancipation (in theaters now, and set to be released on Apple+ Dec. 9), has to go down as his first movie since The Slap, because it doesn’t really make sense as a movie seen through that lens. This isn’t the humbled bit of reputation laundering that some people likely expect it to be, the kind of ennobling period piece meant to make people forget the actor’s real-life indiscretions or help him claim some kind of triumphant comeback (to the extent that he really needs to). It’s not unfair to fear that this is exactly what the movie is, however. Because it’s about slavery. More pointedly, it’s a movie (very) loosely based on the fate of an enslaved man named Gordon, subject of one of the most horrifying, enduring images from that era, “The Scourged Back.” The photo shows Gordon sitting with his face in profile and his back, which is covered in innumerable, keloided scars from having been whipped, confronting the camera. It was taken as a clinical document, but it soon became a tool brandished by abolitionists, widely disseminated both here and abroad. Anyone who’s seen it knows why. For all the ways that films about slavery have made a point of coalescing around brutal, often climactic scenes of whipping, no such scene speaks as loudly as this image, which is all the more haunting for being so calm.
How we get from this image to an Antoine Fuqua action thriller starring Will Smith is its own mystery and a problem that Emancipation isn’t quite prepared to handle. This movie — whatever the ads say, whatever importance is being attached to it — is just a movie. It’s an Antoine Fuqua affair, to be specific, meaning that it’s competent, entertaining genre fare starring one of our most watchable contemporary stars, a man worth giving all of our attention as he faces down soul-breaking adversity and shows, through his stern jaw, believable know-how, and monologues uttered as if through clenched teeth, what it looks like for a spirit not to be broken.
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The title is somewhat ironic. Early on, Peter (as the character based on Gordon is called) overhears that Lincoln frees the slaves and just as quickly realizes that their captivity will not end so easily. They have to escape. Even then, in the end, there’s no going home again — no simple return to one’s family, no automatic liberation, and certainly no chance of a life lived without fear of violence. You escape being another man’s property only for a government to call you contraband — stolen property. You ask to see your family only to be told that you must give your life over to the state, fighting war to secure a freedom that should already always have been yours. By this time, Peter has already been separated from his family. He has been sold off to a more brutal plantation, the kind of place where we’re sure to see close-ups of skin getting branded and camera-pans past hanged bodies casually dangling in the swampy summer heat.
When he hears tell of Lincoln’s effort to free the slaves, Peter and others make a plan to flee to Baton Rouge, Lousiana, to the protection of the Union army. The movie becomes a harrowing depiction of their travails — a surprising, at times, fight against not only the man pursuing them (played by Ben Foster), but the elements. Will Smith wrestles with an alligator, averts troublesome snakes, dodges rats that descend on the corpses sprinkled throughout the war-tarnished landscapes of the movie. He climbs a tree to smoke out a beehive for the honey, thieves cloth and potatoes from under a white family’s nose.
It’s an action movie because we learn, very early on, that there’s nothing Peter cannot do. And nothing, really, that can truly break him. When a white overseer tries to put him in his place, he responds with clenched defiance — the kind of face we’ve seen Smith make before, when his expression tightens and his eyes sharpen into darts. If the movie has a clear politics, this is the stuff that it comes down to, a stark heroism that seemingly defies history, a Black historical subject who can do anything, conquer anything, who’s thrown into a torrent of extreme conditions and yet somehow manages to survive. It’s suitable material for Smith, obviously, and for Fuqua, too. This is no place to do our usual handwringing over the ethics of violence in a movie about slavery. It’s a shameless B-movie: It has an appetite for sensationalist violence, not a clean, pure, thought-out ethics.
And that’s just fine. When Emancipation works, it works. There are some stunning images here, courtesy of Robert Richardson, who gives us night scenes in which hot flames shine out with brilliantly bright light, swamp water flows like ink, silhouettes seem to take a page from Kara Walker’s book. A good cast helps carry Smith through the movie; knowing glances, sharp lines of dialogue, all the necessary side-dishes to what is, essentially, a straightforward chase thriller through murky swamps, with slavery setting the tone and making it all feel urgent. When it’s done being a chase movie, it becomes a solid war movie, doubling down on its graphicness, with shots of spilled-out guts and bullets that rain down on Black soldiers — former slaves — with nihilistic randomness.
If it doesn’t quite work in sum, it’s because the movie seems to be at odds with some of the intentions behind its making. Watching the movie’s appetite for slick, exaggerated action merge with the hardcore realities of chattel slavery is awkward — far less so if you take the movie for what it is rather than what it thinks it is, but even then. Do the filmmakers take it for what it is? If not for its eventual release on Apple+, Emancipation would feel like plausible fare for a TNT or TBS Superstation weekend afternoon lineup, sandwiched somewhere between Glory and The Patriot, or maybe a handsome row of Antoine Fuqua movies, the kind you might supplement with beer and a pile of laundry to fold. That’s not a slight; it’s a verified lane.
Somehow, instead, the movie’s first screening was for the Congressional Black Caucus and emissaries of HBCUs and various social groups. And one of its producers, Joey McFarland, caught heat for flashing the photo of Gordon’s scourged back at the movie’s red carpet premiere, claiming that he’d acquired the photo for his “collection,” claiming to “own” the photograph, using every word a white person would do well to avoid when discussing their relationship to the legacy of slavery and its relics — while, in the process, gassing the historical value of this movie up in ways that are simply unearned. Emancipation is not better off for laying any claim to the actual man that it purports to be about. It is a historically dubious, morally incurious piece of genre fare that satisfies as entertainment and not much else. Pure Hollywood heroism. If we’re going to talk about owning anything, let it be this.
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