News travels slowly in 1860s America, and the law even slower.  While Lincoln had proclaimed that slavery was to be outlawed and persons in servitude were hereby freed, in the eyes of the confederacy, Peter (Will Smith) was still a slave.  After being taken from his home and put to work on laying a railway, Peter escapes and treks northward to a Union camp for his freedom.  The journey through the swamps is a perilous one, and even when he crosses into Union territory, he must enlist in the army to secure his freedom or be sent back south. 

Antoine Fuqua mounts the Smith-starring slavery epic, Emancipation for Apple TV Studios from a Bill Collage script seeking to tell the story of “Whipped Peter,” an image of a slave with deep scars running across his back that quickly showed to the states, and eventually the world, the horrific treatment of the slaves in the South.  In a different world, one without the baggage of “The Slap,” Smith would be making his rounds with this film similar to how Leonardo DiCaprio worked the junkets with The Revenant (2015) playing up The Passion of the Actor, but even Apple seems to have little faith in the picture at this point and premiered it with little fanfare on their service.  At 132 minutes, the stately-looking film was shot by Robert Richardson, and while the staging of the photography is nothing short of beautiful, the colors have virtually all been drained giving the film a black-and-white palate.  On one hand, it is strange to think what this film would look like if it had color as this choice fits the tone of the film very well, but because it treats this story like a myth instead of a piece of history, it does not feel real and it ultimately detracts from the impact that this film should have. 

Smith leads the film, and while his role as Peter is definitely one of his more prestigious roles, he cannot quite shake the action star persona which he has largely built his resume around.  Glimmers of the A-Lister still poke through the on-paper transformative role with rugged looks and scraggly beard, and though it is not enough to totally derail the film, these more charismatic look-at-me moments do contribute to the tonal disconnect which looms over the entire film. Emancipation gives the actor plenty of room to show off his skills and strength as much of the middle act of the film follows Peter alone in the swamp fighting nature and on the run from a vicious slave hunter Jim Fassel (Ben Foster).  The action is all very well shot, yet audiences are always kept at a distance, possibly because everything is a little too manicured, but also because the script does Smith and the few slaves he escapes with little favors in so far as characterization as they are largely nameless and Collage is relying on the inherent human decency of the audience to bring about our connection to the narrative instead of actually building and exploring character arcs. 

Largely, the film can be boiled down to Peter v. Jim, and while synthesizing a systemic problem down into a personal fight is one way to examine the issues at hand, it does not work well here as Collage’s script mishandles the power dynamic on a narrative level.  The script treats Jim and his goons with such contempt, and while this is not a call to valorize the slave owners, to treat them here as almost cartoonish buffoons incapable of anything downplays Peter’s struggle and escape as there is no belief that Jim, even if he does catch up with Peter, will be able to do much of anything.  The immediate and obvious comparison to Emancipation is Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013) which delivers a much more narratively balanced and therefore nuanced story about slavery in America while still condemning the act. Collage and Fuqua are not interested in discussion or introspection with this film, as noted in a short sequence where a young girl (Merah Benoit) alerts her family to Peter’s presence on their lawn. This could have opened the door to an examination of the institutionalized prejudice and racism that still has itself rooted in aspects of modern times, but instead, they shuffle quickly past this opportunity for realization – and hopefully, growth – as they race back to the swamp for more hollow action. 

The biggest tilt of power in the film is on full display from the first scene, framing Peter as a Christ-like figure as he washes his wife’s (Charmaine Bingwa) feet and shares parables about kindness and love to his dotting children who are gathered around. This ritual is disrupted when Jim and his crew break into the home, pulling Peter from his family, and as they drag him from the home he reaches out to hold onto the threshold, breaking it in a show of superhuman strength. Fuqua’s film is seeking to turn Peter into a near-mythological figure, and while a valid argument can be made given how his image was spread, the intentions do not line up with the narrative as it is told. Instead, the visual language used is painting Smith’s Peter as a leader of men, but the narrative does not support this at all. In the early part of the film, the few slaves with whom he mounts an escape are all captured and tortured, and while in the later part of the film he leads a military charge to overtake some cannons and turn the tides of the battle, nothing in the preceding two hours of film support this act and it plays out more like an imagined victory; a daydream, a fantasy. Emancipation, by treating Peter more as a symbol than a person, does a great disservice to his legacy and does little to shed light on his actual story. 

Despite its technical achievements – again, highlighting Richardson’s cinematography as well as Marcelo Zarvos’ score – Emancipation still feels rudderless and confused. Smith, even with all of the swamp mud and the scars is unable to fully immerse himself into the role, and while it is understandable why the star would want this role to be a feather in his cap as he tries to redefine this era of his career with more important and curated roles, the mythologizing of Peter really works against the actor’s best efforts to actually become the character. Fuqua’s direction results in a handsome-looking film that, notwithstanding some gratuitous struggles in the middle act, was clearly thought out visually, but Collage’s unfocused and undetermined script undo every well-made creative decision that makes its way onto the screen. The script is too afraid to dig deep and show us Peter or expand on his story and instead opts for over two hours of half-measures and a heavy reliance on audiences’ already-present damnation of the history of slavery in the United States to provide the emotional beats of the film and hopes that no one will notice how empty and soulless everything feels on the page. A poorly conceived blueprint leads to a poorly constructed building, and though Fuqua wrangles his creative departments to deliver, he is bound by the shortcuts Collage took in the writing process which ultimately undermines every decision the director made before the first take was even shot.