For rilaws, ‘Emancipation’ was a bracing, dreadful thing to watch. Read his full review here:
, a survival epic with far more righteousness at its heart. Smith plays Peter, a character based on a real man, called Gordon, who escaped slavery in 1863 and became an emblem of the abolitionist movement when a photograph of his back, riddled with keloid scars after years of whipping, made its way across America.is, in some senses, a biopic, but Fuqua is ultimately more interested in a fraught odyssey toward freedom than he is in specific biographical detail.
Most of the film is a litany of brutality, from the especially cruel conditions of Peter’s enslavement to his flight across the swamps of Louisiana, teeming with threats natural and man-made. It’s a bracing, dreadful thing to watch, an unimaginable hardship modeled on true experience and then given a hefty cinematic zhush.’s script is sourced from history and what has been invented for the demands of big-ticket moviemaking.
In an effort to tamp down some of that Hollywood panache, Fuqua has desaturated his film to a palette just shy of pure monochrome. Sometimes fire glows orange, or blood oozes red, but mostlyis a soup of gray and dull greens. Given how hard he works to create a sense of massive scope—huge scenes full of people and activity—it’s curious that Fuqua would then choose to mute those meticulously crafted pictures.
Which may be the right ideological tack to take when making a movie about something as hideous as slavery. But Fuqua’s chosen technique only undermines his solemn intentions, rather than using starkness to make a salient point.Still, Fuqua’s action sequences are, in their harrowing way, undeniable. Fuqua has always been good with physics, understanding how to use motion and trajectory to propel his films forward.
Making his way with flinty purpose through all this violent terror is Smith, in the serious-movie mode familiar to those who’ve seen. He strains and grimaces with mighty determination, giving superhuman shape to Peter’s tireless pursuit of deliverance. There’s no time to complicate the character with any idiosyncratic humanity; he is all grit and drive until the emotional release of the film’s closing minutes.
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