“Emancipation” starring Will Smith Oscar thriller?

At least Antoine Fuqua’s “Emancipation,” starring Will Smith as a runaway slave in Civil War-era Louisiana, is not a traditional Oscar movie.
Despite the film’s important historical backdrop, timing for awards season, and inevitable connection to last March’s Academy Awards ceremony, the site of the Slap, “Emancipation” is not quite the solemn prestige picture you could easily mistake it for. It is an action thriller.
“12 Years a Slave” is less like Fuqua’s other genre movies than it is an acutely piercing drama. Instead of being a gritty, survival actioner, it is more akin to a chase movie that takes its potency less from psychological realism than a brutal B-movie construction. “Emancipation” is a straightforward parable of Black resistance and spiritual perseverance, immersed in the desperate but cunning escape of Peter (Smith).
Many recent big-screen treatments of slavery make “Emancipation,” which debuts Friday in theaters and premieres Dec. 9 on Apple TV+, shallow. Although it is often harrowing and gripping, Fuqua’s film is less nuanced and too narrowly confined in genre conventions than its real-life protagonist deserves.
Many accounts claim that Peter’s real name was Gordon, making him a pivotal but little-known figure in history. He escaped from a Louisiana plantation in March 1863. He reached the Union army stationed in Baton Rouge after a more than 40-mile flight ten days later. A photograph of him seated on a chair with his bare back turned to the camera was taken there. His back was mangled by a crisscross of scars. The photograph known as “Whipped Peter” became one of the most iconic portraits of slavery’s barbarism, and helped fuel abolitionist movements in the North. Gordon joined the Union army afterwards.
William N. Collage’s “Emancipation” expands Peter’s tale with just a few facts. Draining the nearly black-and-white film almost entirely of color, Fuqua has given Peter some familiar notes of family and faith. Peter, who is Haitian with a Creole accent, is ripped away from his family to help build a railroad for the Confederates. His goal is to get back to his wife (Charmaine Bingwa) and children. Peter’s torturous journey takes on Biblical dimensions with an unflagging belief in God. The monochrome swamps of Louisiana morph into a metaphorical wasteland because of the great violence that surrounds him and other enslaved men. One man asks, “Where is God?” There is no sign of him.
Fassel (Ben Foster), the white man who guards against runaways with a menacing relish, tells Peter that he’s his god. “I let you walk the Earth,” he snarls. It’s Fassel who, with two others, chase Peter on horseback when he grasps his moment to flee. Peter sets out on his own, initially with several others including Gordon (Gilbert Owuor) and John (Michael Luwoye). In few films does the setting play such an integral role as it does in “Emancipation”, as Peter ingeniously navigates through mud, snakes and alligators with the sound, as he says, of “Lincoln’s canons” guiding his way to Baton Rouge.
Perhaps Peter Smith is relying less on his natural charisma than he ever has before. The character speaks very little. Smith’s performance is formidable as a physical feat. However, there is very little detail about Peter, and very few things that make him relatable. The film has supplied Peter with little beyond the most basic of characterizations, ones drawn more from countless other thrillers than from history, if “Emancipation” is partly a work of historical imagination.
Robert Richardson’s cinematography is often mesmerizing but can be distracting at times. The camera’s too flashy; it’d be better if it were more subtle, like the occasional pops of color throughout. There are also mesmerizing black-and-white tableaus that seem to want to pull “Emancipation” to a higher realm; however, this is done at the cost of sticking rigorously to Peter’s perspective.
Still, as Fuqua’s previous films have shown, a lean thriller can be a powerful thing. “Emancipation” is not heavy-handed with self-importance, but it is focused in its depiction of the savage inhumanity of slavery, and one man’s courageous, indomitable refusal to accept it. The final third of the film proves that war is just as violent and merciless. In “Emancipation,” Hell is not just present, but it is also elsewhere.
“Emancipation,” an Apple TV+ release, has been given an R rating by the Motion Picture Association for strong racial violence, disturbing images and language. The running time of the film is 132 minutes. Two and a half stars.