Will Smith and Ben Foster in “Emancipation.”

Will Smith’s New Movie, ‘Emancipation,’ Misses Its Mark

Meandering and dull, in both visuals and storyline, we'd hoped for more from this slavery drama

Will Smith and Ben Foster in “Emancipation.”

Apple TV+

Both emotionally and visually dull, Antoine Fuqua’s Emancipation is a strangely scattered embellishment of real events from the American Civil War. It’s based on (and in many ways, reverse-engineered from) the famous “scourged back” photograph of a man named Gordon—though some refer to him as “whipped Peter,” owing to confusingly detailed accounts of a different man’s escape—displaying the scars of his whipping, an image that became a rousing emblem for the horrors of American slavery.

Will Smith plays Peter, a Haitian family man enslaved on a Louisiana plantation, who’s sent to work on railroad tracks for the Confederacy before escaping and joining the Union Army (when the iconic photo would be taken). There’s a minor supporting character named Gordon, too (played by Gilbert Owuor), who takes a parallel journey we never see, making it apparent that Fuqua and writer William N. Collage had hoped to untangle this history in their own unique way. The duo’s dramatizations, however, lack narrative focus, and in the process, they fail to fully rebuild the humanity and dignity stolen from their characters.

Peter suffers violent humiliations for as long as he can. He may not be literate, but he knows enough about the swamplands en route to his destination, and about basic first aid, to make it pretty far on foot. However, the film is rarely interested in his intriguing internal life, as both a resourceful figure in harrowing circumstances, and as a devout Christian, whose deep-seated faith clashes with the inhumanity around him. An early conversation between Peter and a fellow slave—who’s just been tortured, and has no reason to believe in Christ as strongly as Peter—sets the stage for a challenge to his convictions that never comes.

Will Smith, Michael Luwoye and Gilbert Owuor in “Emancipation.”

Apple TV+

The film does feature hints of a spiritual throughline, involving the ethereal ripple effects of Peter’s pain and that of his wife, Dodienne (Charmaine Bingwa), which they each appear to sense beyond the confines of space and time. Bingwa’s measured performance allows Dodienne to ride a razor-thin line between dignity and survival, forces that are frequently at odds when she’s forced to protect her four children in Peter’s absence. By matching Smith’s resilience, she becomes an embodiment not only of what Peter fights for, but a well from which he draws his strength. However, even this glowing depiction of love, as a force more powerful than any shackle or act of evil, ends up isolated to its own minor corner of the story. It rears its head far too infrequently to have a meaningful impact on Peter’s drama, or on the movie’s larger themes of faith in the face of indignity.

Imani Pullum and Charmaine Bingwa in “Emancipation.”

Apple TV+

The screenplay’s structure immediately splinters once Peter makes his initial escape. Having received word of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, his long-term plan involves escaping to Baton Rouge, and seeking the Union Army’s help to free his wife and kids. However, Fuqua treats each challenge in the unforgiving marshlands as its own vignette, whose presentation feels both physically and emotionally disconnected from each preceding or subsequent scene. The director’s awkward use of space yields jarring cuts that make it difficult to track both direction and emotion, two elements necessary to connect with the story of a man on the run. We know where he wants to end up, but the hurdles within each individual scene—from the wildlife, to the harsh terrain, to his own throbbing injuries—remain opaque until the moment he clears them.

Ben Foster in “Emancipation.”

Apple TV+

Peter’s ruthless slave driver, Fassel (Ben Foster), is also on his tail, but since he’s also in pursuit of two other “runaways,” connecting the dots between any two intercut scenes (of Fassel and Peter) becomes its own act of mental calculation. The film lacks a sense of rhythm and continuity, and rarely offers clarity on the physical relationship between its hunter and hunted. It makes Peter’s desperation (or lack thereof) in a given scene hard to parse, since we seldom know if the danger is near or far.

Smith performs admirably and powerfully in close-up, bursting at the seams with withheld rage, but any shot wider than that may as well be a guessing game as to what he’s feeling.

Making the film even less comprehensible is its bizarre visual tone, which is muted nearly to the point of grayscale. One may be able to intellectualize the rationale at play—it’s a particularly grim and violent story—but the execution is a head-scratcher. Robert Richard is a fantastic cinematographer (he was responsible for Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, a film in which color, time, and mood are intrinsically bound), so the onus most likely falls on the slapdash color correction, which saps the film of all hue, but also pushes the visual contrast to the degree that physical and emotional details are frequently lost. In a story about Peter’s journey to being photographed after escaping to freedom, the fact that the film’s photography ends up obscuring Black faces and expression more than white ones—given its enormously high-contrast palette—is especially thoughtless (to say nothing of the film’s producer Joey McFarland parading the real scourged back photograph on the movie’s red carpet, crowning himself the new King of Poor Taste). Smith performs admirably and powerfully in close-up, bursting at the seams with withheld rage, but any shot wider than that may as well be a guessing game as to what he’s feeling.

Will Smith in “Emancipation.”

Apple TV+

On the plus side, the one unique thing Emancipation does, which so few slavery films have even attempted, is to paint a wider portrait of American racism beyond the confines of the slavery south. The Union Army is undoubtedly Peter’s salvation, but his brief scenes embedded within its regiment offer brief hints as to the oncoming challenges of the Reconstruction era and beyond, even for those in the north. Racism was not absent north of the Confederacy, and for many white folks in the Union, their relationship to Blackness merely featured different (see: more “acceptable”) methods of control. This distinct lack of idealism is a refreshing departure from most films in the genre, though it may arrive too little too late into the movie’s 132-minute runtime, given Fuqua’s inability to either fully dramatize Peter’s struggles, or to tap into his righteous fury in the few moments the film deploys bloody violence.

Emancipation frequently feels caught halfway between a prestige drama and a viscerally enrapturing romp; think Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave versus Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained.

Emancipation frequently feels caught halfway between a prestige drama and a viscerally enrapturing romp; think Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave versus Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. By cherry picking mere flourishes from both modes of film, it ends up being neither, residing instead in a lukewarm dramatic middle-ground, where evoking any kind of emotion (let alone the ostensibly “correct” one) feels like a secondary concern, subsumed by the desire to merely present the shape of American slavery and its horrors from a distance. Fuqua may create sprawling tableaus on occasion, deftly depicting a top-down view of what personal and collective battlefields might look like. However, his ineffectual approach to the intellectually and emotionally intimate—coupled with the movie’s washed-out appearance—robs Emancipation of the ability to create lasting or resonant imagery, even out of a story about one of the most lasting, resonant images in American history.

Published on December 7, 2022

Words by Siddhant Adlakha

Siddhant Adlakha is a critic and filmmaker from Mumbai, though he now lives in New York City. They're more similar than you'd think. Find him at @SiddhantAdlakha on Twitter