Will Smith Makes an Arduous Trek in ‘Emancipation’

Back in the olden days of 2015, Leonardo DiCaprio scraped and grunted his way toward an Oscar in the grueling survival film The Revenant. It was a gnarly spectacle, technically dazzling but cold at the center. It was awfully hard to care about this guy, tearing across native lands in the pre-Civil War American frontier. He was, in many ways, a part of the ongoing horror of manifest destiny. Why root for him?

Will Smith does something similar in Antoine Fuqua’s Emancipation (in theaters now, on AppleTV+ December 9), a survival epic with far more righteousness at its heart. Smith plays Peter, a character based on a real man, called Gordon, who escaped slavery in 1863 and became an emblem of the abolitionist movement when a photograph of his back, riddled with keloid scars after years of whipping, made its way across America. Emancipation is, in some senses, a biopic, but Fuqua is ultimately more interested in a fraught odyssey toward freedom than he is in specific biographical detail. 

Most of the film is a litany of brutality, from the especially cruel conditions of Peter’s enslavement to his flight across the swamps of Louisiana, teeming with threats natural and man-made. It’s a bracing, dreadful thing to watch, an unimaginable hardship modeled on true experience and then given a hefty cinematic zhush.

It’s difficult to tell what in William N. Collage’s script is sourced from history and what has been invented for the demands of big-ticket moviemaking. In the film, Peter fights an alligator, he has a bloody showdown with some slave catchers as a stately old mansion burns to the ground behind him. These are mighty set pieces, but they also have the effect of making us question the film’s reality. Emancipation is yet another movie that has trouble reconciling its blockbuster impulses with the graveness of its subject matter. Should a story like this be told so sensationally? 

In an effort to tamp down some of that Hollywood panache, Fuqua has desaturated his film to a palette just shy of pure monochrome. Sometimes fire glows orange, or blood oozes red, but mostly Emancipation is a soup of gray and dull greens. Given how hard he works to create a sense of massive scope—huge scenes full of people and activity—it’s curious that Fuqua would then choose to mute those meticulously crafted pictures. It’s not unlike what Sarah Polley did with Women Talking—both filmmakers push a principled aversion to beauty all the way into drabness.

Which may be the right ideological tack to take when making a movie about something as hideous as slavery. But Fuqua’s chosen technique only undermines his solemn intentions, rather than using starkness to make a salient point. Emancipation is overthought to its increasing detriment. 

Still, Fuqua’s action sequences are, in their harrowing way, undeniable. Fuqua has always been good with physics, understanding how to use motion and trajectory to propel his films forward. The big final battle, after Peter has been essentially conscripted into the Union army (the film is careful to show that many Northerners were not exactly welcoming to freedmen), is a gruesome highlight, vividly depicting the mad chaos of armed conflict. 

Making his way with flinty purpose through all this violent terror is Smith, in the serious-movie mode familiar to those who’ve seen I Am Legend or Concussion. He strains and grimaces with mighty determination, giving superhuman shape to Peter’s tireless pursuit of deliverance. There’s no time to complicate the character with any idiosyncratic humanity; he is all grit and drive until the emotional release of the film’s closing minutes. It is the kind of performance—stoic, heroic, tough—that has done awards wonders for actors in the past. Whether Smith will be brought into that particular fold this year is, of course, a complicated question. 

Emancipation is, for the most part, uncomplicated. Not in any pejorative sense. It simply has a mission and executes that with blunt force. There is plenty of ornateness in the film, but Fuqua never stops to admire or, really, explore what he’s made. Grimly enough, the film’s only real pause for reflection is in a scene featuring Ben Foster’s wicked villain, a ruthless tracker and marksman who monologues about his fears of what a free America might mean for white people. It’s there, in this storytime speech about white America’s murderous self-preservation, that Emancipation insists itself into contemporary political meaning. When so much of what this vile adversary is saying still sounds so horribly familiar, has Peter’s arduous journey really ended?