The new Will Smith film “Emancipation” opened today and it has received mixed reviews. While Rotten Tomatoes gave it a red “Fresh Tomato” rating, it just barely qualified. Reviewers critical of the film describe it as too much of an action film. Many reviews also mentioned its star’s infamous act of violence at the Oscar’s this year.
The film is inspired by a famous 1863 photo of the back of an escaped slave whose back was badly scarred by whippings he had endured. An illustration of the photo was published in Harper’s Weekly on July 4, 1863. The man, variously identified as “Gordon” or “Peter,” was described as having enlisted in the United States Colored Troops.
The New York Times gave the film a very positive review. According to the New York Times:
For much of the period drama “Emancipation,” the promise of its title seems cruelly out of reach. In 1863, freedom seems near-impossible for the enslaved Black Americans in the Old South, whether they’re working on its plantations or running through its swamps. That promise, though, is about all that this movie’s resilient hero has during a relentless, brutal, grim journey that takes him across a hellscape filled with terror and suffering.
There are no benevolent white belles and polite gentlemen in “Emancipation,” no trace of the grotesque plantation fantasies so beloved by old Hollywood. That’s to the movie’s point and purpose, as it sets out to show the barbaric price that slavery exacts on human beings, both individually and collectively. In this respect, the movie functions as a necessary corrective to the familiar, big-screen fictions about the American slave trade even as — in its sweep and narrative beats, in its emphasis on a heroic individual and in its casting of Will Smith — it is also very much a propulsive, Hollywood-style action-fueled adventure….
Written by William N. Collage, “Emancipation” was inspired by a famous, widely circulated photograph of a horrifically scarred former enslaved man. Often referred to as “The Scourged Back,” the image — also identified as “Escaped slave Gordon, also known as ‘Whipped Peter’” — was published with an article about him in Harper’s Weekly in 1863. An illustrated version of the photo was flanked by two images purported to be of the same man, one of him dressed in tattered clothing and the other in a Union uniform — a triptych that creates a kind of narrative arc that the movie has fictionally expanded on.
The photograph served as a testament to the annihilating inhumanity of slavery, and in some attenuated fashion, that is also how “Emancipation” can be appreciated. The movie is flawed; it features far too many aerial shots and one unfortunate scene with an alligator edges into exploitation-cinema absurdity. Fuqua’s tendency toward overstatement also means that the movie lacks modulation, which, among other things, makes it difficult for Smith to do much other than square his jaw and push forward. Yet Peter’s story and Smith’s warmth carry you through this movie, which has heart and conviction and toughness — the image of the pretty little white girl who points at Peter while screaming “runaway!” will rightly haunt you.
The Hollywood trade paper Variety saw the film as stronly structured:
More than 150 years since the end of the Civil War, slavery remains the scar that just won’t heal in the United States. Recognizing that, Antoine Fuqua’s “Emancipation” is a bracing and still-necessary attempt to face this painful legacy head-on, inspired by perhaps the single most powerful image we have of a once-enslaved person: the 1863 portrait of “Whipped Peter,” whose lacerated back served as shocking proof of unconscionable mistreatment by his white “masters.” That photograph, widely circulated during the Civil War, forced the world to confront the cruelty of this system — much as Fuqua himself does with this unflinching account of a free man’s escape … and the society that conspired to keep him in chains.
Anchored by an ultra-focused and unusually low-key Will Smith as Peter, “Emancipation” can be an intense and at times almost unbearable thing to watch, presented in meticulously composed, nearly black-and-white frames, desaturated to the point of Civil War photographer Matthew Brady’s grim battlefield tableaux. Seeing Black men chained and beaten, their limbs ripped apart by dogs, and any kind of resistance met with a bullet to the head or back will have audiences covering their eyes, sobbing or both.
…It’s stunning to watch, but nothing compared with the Civil War sequence that caps the film. Narratively, this protracted finale stops Peter’s mission cold in its tracks: How will he reach Dodienne if he dies on the front? But philosophically, it makes an all-important statement: For Peter, personal freedom was only the beginning. This hero — rendered immortal by that photo but representative of thousands forgotten by history — was committed to putting an end to the system that had brutalized him so. When Smith finally bares the character’s back for the camera, most of us know what to expect, but that doesn’t mean we’re prepared for the sight. “Emancipation” challenges us to look again, at that constellation of lashes, but also at every other blow against human dignity the film depicts.
While most of the reviews have been very positive, nearly 40% have been negative. The Washington Post critique is representative of these:
The historical drama “Emancipation” wraps a simultaneously excruciating and uplifting narrative around the man in that electrifying photo: Will Smith plays Peter (who was historically known as Whipped Peter as well as Gordon) as something of a 19th-century action hero, a man sanctified by God and endued with superhuman physical strength, acuteness of perception and spiritual grit. Directed by Antoine Fuqua with an occasionally puzzling combination of restraint and stylization, “Emancipation” turns a potent image into a pageant of spectacle and suffering.
The AP review was also critical of the film:
Despite the film’s important historical backdrop, its awards-season timing and its inevitable connection to last March’s Academy Awards ceremony, the site of the Slap, “Emancipation” is not quite the solemn prestige picture you could easily mistake it for. It’s an action thriller.
Fuqua, a maker of muscular genre movies, has crafted something with less in common than an acutely piercing drama like “12 Years a Slave,” and instead made a film more akin to a gritty, survival actioner — a chase movie that takes its potency less from psychological realism than a brutal B-movie construction. Immersed in the desperate but cunning escape of Peter (Smith), “Emancipation” is a straightforward parable of Black resistance and spiritual perseverance.
I have not seen the film yet. Let us know if you have in the comments.
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:
