Emancipation moves inexorably from one sequence of hopelessness and suffering to another. This may be expected from a film that tells the story of the slavery experience during the two-and-a-half-year period between Abraham Lincoln’s January 1863 proclamation freeing all slaves in the United States, and June 1865, when word reached the last of those slaves. Screenwriter Bill Collage’s perspective, though, is narrowed to the specific experiences of one man, ignoring, to the film’s detriment, even the stories of other men present here. Strangely, it becomes an exercise in formula, boiling swaths of history down to an extended chase sequence, which rather ends with an anticlimax, before briefly becoming a war drama without much motivation.
It isn’t as if Collage and director Antoine Fuqua needed to introduce humor into this mixture of ultra-serious genre exercises, but some tonal variation might have been nice in what becomes fairly grueling – not only in what we are witnessing, which is unavoidable, but in how we are witnessing it. The first sign that something is off here comes in the form of Fuqua’s visual style, in which a sternly monochromatic desaturation is employed in tandem with cinematographer Robert Richardson to communicate the lack of much hope in this story. It makes sense for the first half of the movie, which takes place among a group of slavers and their “property,” who are building a railroad in the first months after the Emancipation Proclamation.
Understandably, word of impending freedom reaches the ears of men not remotely interested in giving up what they see as rightfully theirs. But when Peter (Will Smith), the man whose story this is and which has been borrowed from a real former slave named “Gordon,” overhears two of those men discussing the recent proclamation, a plan quickly forms in his mind. He is determined, after all, to return to his children and his wife Dodienne (Charmaine Bingwa), whom he was forced to leave behind when he was attached to the railroad construction. That project is overseen by Jim Fassel (Ben Foster), whose evil is both horrifying and banal, but who is jarringly also revealed to be a meticulous aim with a rifle once an exit strategy is devised by the rebellion-stirring Peter.
Fassel is here simply to put a face on the horrors of slavery, and Foster is a compelling presence. But once Peter goes on the run, with Fassel in pursuit, Smith owns the entire show in a performance of unbelievable strength in the face of savagery. The actor has long been one of the best of his generation, and here he is very strong as a kind and intelligent man. Much about Peter, however, remains at a distance from the audience, through no fault of the actor. It simply remains an unfortunate truth that Peter is more of a symbolic figure than a literal one – even as he wrestles digitally created alligators (this sequence is effective and multi-phased in its build-up, at least), hides from his captors inside hollow trees, and ultimately joins the military to secure freedom that has been granted him already.
The episodic structure of the narrative is the culprit of that emotional distance from what is happening. The horrors of slavery are more of a backdrop and a vessel for particularly tough-minded spectacle, rather than the focus of any of the human drama the film ignores as a result. Collage and Fuqua practically forget about Dodienne, for instance, except to inform us of an injury she obtains during the period while Peter is gone. That, despite the strength of Smith’s convincing performance, sinks Emancipation.
Photo courtesy of Apple TV+
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