One of the most powerful images in American history is of a slave who escaped a Mississippi plantation during the last days of the Civil War and found refuge with Union soldiers in Louisiana. The stark photo, with the man’s back a mess of gnarled scars, was a crucial tool in showing the evils of slavery and supporting Abolitionists’ cause. There’s a powerful story to be told about that photo and the power of images to illuminate truth. Unfortunately, Antoine Fuqua’s Emancipation is more interested in having Will Smith fight alligators.
Smith plays Peter, a slave ripped away from his wife and daughter to help build a railroad for the Confederates. When he hears that Lincoln has emancipated slaves, he makes a daring escape through the Louisiana swamps to try and reach Union troops and urge them to rescue his family.
Fuqua, director of action thrillers like Training Day and Olympus Has Fallen, crafts a brutal and often gripping survival thriller. He looks unflinchingly at the horror and violence endured by slaves, and Peter’s trek places him in an environment where nearly everything can kill him. In addition to keeping one step ahead of his former master (Ben Foster), Peter must endure a swamp filled with snakes, bees, and gators. It uses slavery as the background to an action movie, and while it’s never disrespectful to the real-life atrocities, it keeps them largely surface level. Opportunities to explore the banality of evil or the parallels between Civil War-era conflict and modern-day strife are brought up only to be dismissed.
The screenplay by Bill Collage never seems interested in being anything other than a thrilling action-adventure. The story runs from incident to incident and never stops for much introspection. Peter’s barely a character; beyond knowing that he has a family awaiting him, there’s not much on the page. There’s an interesting subtext about Peter’s faith and his desire to keep it even as slave owners use the same Bible to defend their actions, but the film treats it largely as wallpaper. It’s supposed to be moving when Peter arrives home and thanks God, but the film has never entered into the personal conflict it sets up regarding his faith.
Likewise, the film’s villains are presented as pure evil, almost cartoonishly vicious. It’s a fine line to walk, of course. Slavery was a barbaric and evil institution, and its perpetrators committed atrocities that were monstrous. But by making them into caricatures, the script never examines how men who could be our neighbors and brothers justified evil actions, a crucial tool to addressing the entrenched racism that still exists in the country today.
The script’s weak points stand out because so much of the rest of the film is clearly designed to have a sheen of importance. Smith’s performance, his first since winning an Oscar® for King Richard, is impressive. His body is emaciated and scarred, his charisma internalized until there’s nothing but rage and a desire to survive. Smith ably adopts a Haitian patois, and his eyes convey a breadth of heartache, righteous fury, and intelligence. It’s a good performance, one of Smith’s strongest. Foster’s character is written as a monster but the actor is one of the best at portraying quiet menace, and a childhood experience he shares late in the film gives a hint at what turned him into a monster, even if the film quickly abandons any of that nuance.
Robert Richardson’s cinematography goes a long way toward elevating the material, giving it a respectful somberness and sense of dread. Nearly all the color is drained away, save for a few hints of red blood, green trees, or the yellow and orange of fire. In places, the film appears to almost be filmed in black and white, and there are long shots that gaze on the violent landscapes and give them a brutal beauty. It captures the stark look of the original photos and conveys a sense of desperation and horror. It’s one of the best-looking films of 2022.
Will Smith in “Emancipation.” Courtesy of Apple TV+
The performances and cinematography set a bar that the screenplay, unfortunately, cannot clear. The film carries a feeling of gravitas, but at heart it’s still just a surface-level action thriller. As that, though, it’s often good. Fuqua handles action and chase sequences well, and he’s not afraid to stare at the violence and horror of slavery, or let the audience feel a bit of righteous anger when Peter finally gets to strike back against his captor. The alligator sequence might feel out of place on paper, but it’s tense and effective, and a climactic battle sequence that showcases Peter fighting alongside Union soldiers is harrowing. Smith’s consistently been one of cinema’s most commanding presences, and the physicality he brings is impressive. Fuqua’s greatest strength has long been his ability to work with his actors and encourage them to deliver stand-out performances; Smith’s isn’t quite on par with Denzel Washington’s iconic performance in Training Day, but it’s some of the best work Fuqua has gotten from an actor since that film.
In the end, Emancipation’s failures stem less from whether it’s good or bad than the weight of expectations brought by its subject matter and the presence of its newly minted Oscar® winner (Smith’s Oscar® night behavior, unfortunately, has also brought new curiosity). Emancipation simply cannot shoulder the burden of being a great and important movie; it is, however, a harrowing and often effective one, with performances and artistry that sometimes make it feel more noteworthy than it is.
