There is a lot of buzz about "Emancipation," most negative and almost all about lead Will Smith. Sure yeah, he's gotten himself into a bit of a controversy, but so has probably every other actor. What I'm getting at is, yeah, I know what he did, and no review of his subsequent project after the drama can escape it.
But as for the actual movie, it shows many powerful scenes in bloody detail about the horrors of slavery and racism during the Civil War, but it spoon-feeds these emotions timidly. Director Antione Fuqua and writer Bill Collage feel the need to show us again and again how the oppression won't break the enslaved, robbing us the audience of the rawness that this story should have. Smith's character, Peter, preaches about god to anyone who will listen, and his belief is shown to keep him alive and willing. I disagree- his belief that he is being done wrong and his will to survive should have been the reason, but alas, I am no filmmaker. An alleged god has nothing to do with racism even if the South would like to think otherwise. They were wrong, it is as simple as that.
Early on Peter is sold off, ripped from his wife (Charmaine Bingwa) and children, and forced to build railroads to transport cannons for the Confederate army. The camera lingers images of death and badness, and in these scenes we get are about as honest a look into the dark side of America as possible considering this is a commercial movie. There is a huge amount of gloss splashed atop a dirty camp, with incredible cinematography by Robert Richardson, but at the end of the day, this is still a dirty camp, one where there is probably more blood than water in that muddy Louisiana swamp.
In general this is a splendid looking film, with a desaturated, near black and white color scheme that I suppose represents how slavery wants quote black and white. Shame the film doesn't ever explore that.
Soon he escapes, and every other slave follows, scattered in all different directions. A few follow him but they soon separate so that they're more difficult to track. Their goal? Baton Rouge to join Lincoln's army, where they'd be freed men. But Fassel, a tracker played by Ben Foster, heads out into the deadly marshland to bring Peter back, or at least his disembodied head.
Foster plays the role with a casual disinterest, like a man who'd probably prefer a pipe of tobacco and nice glass of sweet tea to a life of policing racism. There's minimal development to his character but he plays a racist well, which is probably not something he really wants to hear.
But Peter's escape is hardly the end of "Emancipation," something the trailers give away: he does make it to the Union Army and joins them. The last thirty or so minutes are spent showing another form of brutality: the actual Civil War. I'm no historian and cannot claim any moment of the battle scene is accurate, or really anything else during its runtime, but they're about as riveting as any war movie I've seen.
And despite the two-star score, I recommend "Emancipation" on the importance of its subject and not by its execution. We shouldn't forget the stupid things we do as a country but we shouldn't glamorize them either, but I can't shake the feeling that all the money involved here couldn't be better spent on something other than a simplified action movie.
