Elephants tend to crowd a room the more we try to ignore them, so might as well begin with the baggage that the slave drama Emancipation has been saddled with as its star Will Smith does the usual promotion. Ignoring has long since become the new panning, so the ongoing discussion over what has now been dubbed The Slap will likely fuel far more attention and box office returns rather than detracting from either.
Questions of fairness (and all else) aside, Emancipation was always going to be at least slightly weighted down due to its subject matter. As videos of police brutality continue to proliferate and a new generation of activists have become increasingly a part of the public discourse, so too has a number of media about slavery hit screens big and small, so much that they’ve practically become a genre unto themselves.
Far from praise, much of said media has come under criticism, mainly due to how they tend to feature one-dimensional, easily dismissed villains and settings which are rife with violence against Black bodies while ironically simplifying issues of race and giving white audiences a kind of safe remove by depicting these American horror stories in a period setting. It translates to a rather baffling conundrum for the film industry to find itself in – an issue that’s clearly wrong and rife with opportunities for dramatic visual effect, but nevertheless still a tough sell for audiences.
Not so long ago, it would’ve been laughable that a star with as much history and cachet as Will Smith could’ve been deemed a risky prospect as a leading man, but The Slap has indeed transformed him into something of a tenuous investment in spite of his monumental history of award-winning work as an actor and rapper, not to mention the number of mediocre projects he’s elevated due to his magnetic presence.
“What makes Emancipation thrilling is that it manages to get just enough right to avoid tipping into the sheer frenzy of glorification or overwrought preachiness.”
Where does that leave Emancipation? Turns out, it’s remarkable only in that it’s still rather average in spite of star and subject. Smith is portraying a man deeply recognizable even as his name and story became mostly lost to time. Yet the image he left behind, the 1863 photo which became known as “Whipped Peter” due to the very visible mutilation on his back by the indisputable marks of a whip, isn’t only brutally familiar to us all, it remains on display in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
Emancipation attempts to bring Peter to life as the loving patriarch of an enslaved family in 1863 Louisiana which has miraculously managed to remain together. We know it’s not going to last, and Peter is sold and wrenched away from them and forced to work on behalf of the Confederacy building a railroad in brutal conditions. His eventual escape is only the beginning, kicking off a treacherous journey through swamps, a war-torn country, and pursued by a hunter (Ben Foster) who is determined to track him down before Peter reaches Union troops and his freedom, thanks to Lincoln’s recent Emancipation Proclamation.
The movie may paint itself as prestige, but Emancipation has far more in common with the pulp that such stories have traditionally been restricted to in a culture often far more interested in the existential angst of white men than examining who those men may be casually ignoring and dehumanizing on their myopic road to stability. All the typical signifiers are there: the violence in both past and present, the irredeemable villains, a good woman and the happy family life that acts as the oasis in a storm of horror, and the morality which eventually punishes those who stray from it.
“Emancipation also at least refuses to soften the situation with any sort of solidarity with white prisoners and eschews white saviours entirely, with Foster giving one of the most chilling performances of his career.”
What makes Emancipation thrilling is that it manages to get just enough right to avoid tipping into the sheer frenzy of glorification or overwrought preachiness. Peter’s commitment to his Christianity would threaten to tip into the worst of faith-based melodrama if the movie didn’t also put Bible verses into the mouths of his enslavers in a grim reminder that a soothing balm can easily be weaponized for far more horrific ends.
Emancipation also at least refuses to soften the situation with any sort of solidarity with white prisoners and eschews white saviours entirely, with Foster giving one of the most chilling performances of his career. He is deeply aware of the threat Peter represents, and his story of how he was indoctrinated into hatred to assist in killing the Black woman who raised him is a campfire horror story all in itself, and regrettably the only time Emancipation attempts to interrogate what makes such monsters in the first place.
And of course there’s Smith himself, who is at his most committed and even manages to almost transform cheap jump scares into elevated horror. He can’t work miracles, and Peter doesn’t have much in the way of defining characteristics aside from his determination to survive and endure, but Antoine Fuqua’s action movie bonafide’s manage to admirably centre his star’s grizzled face and drive without distracting from the thrilling sequences or the remarkable cinematography which teeters on embracing the nature of the Louisiana bayou which can shelter and devour in equal measure. Or it would if it weren’t devoted to depriving it of much of its colour in case we somehow forgot this is about the wondrous cruelty of men.
By far the smartest decision was allowing Peter to remain fully human while overcoming the wearily familiar obstacles. He is not defined by the villain of the film, nor is he a one man avenging angel. It’s not enough to make Emancipation great or Peter a fully fleshed out character, but it does lend an air of respect to the film’s mission of speaking for those who have been lost, to history and far more sinister forces.
