Will Smith begins road to redemption with Oscar-tipped slavery drama
Amajor new film about a real-life escaped slave premiered this week. Emancipation is the story of “Whipped Peter”, who fled barbaric forced labour on a railroad in 1863 and went on a perilous 10-day journey through the Louisiana swamps before finding refuge at a Union encampment. Photographs of his back, a mesh of welts and strafe marks, shocked Americans and aided the abolitionist cause.
Reviews were largely ecstatic, praising its commitment to the brutal truth and the unflinching, moving performance of its leading actor. A shoo-in for awards glory, presumably?
No, for Emancipation is the comeback vehicle of Will Smith, who last year squandered decades of goodwill by slapping Chris Rock on stage at the Oscars after the comedian made a joke about Smith’s wife’s shaved head. (It is still unclear whether Rock was aware of Jada Pinkett Smith’s alopecia.)
An hour after the assault, Smith was back on stage, tearfully picking up his best actor award for his role in King Richard, to a standing ovation. But the actor – and the Academy – had misjudged public opinion and, in the following days, both apologised profusely.
The star was banned from all Oscars events for the next decade but allowed to keep his award, and there is nothing to prevent him being nominated for – or winning – another one in the interim. Although picking it up might be a problem.
“In a normal world, his performance in Emancipation would be Oscars catnip,” says Steven Gaydos, executive director of trade magazine Variety. “And it feels like it might still be, in some way.”
Such stories tend to be a natural hit with awards voters: in 2014, Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave – the true story of Solomon Northup, a freeman kidnapped and sold into slavery in 19th-century Louisiana – won eight Oscars including best picture. Two years later, Nate Parker’s directorial debut, The Birth of a Nation, about the man who led a slave rebellion in 1831 Virginia, was the big hit of Sundance and looked set to make a clean sweep at the Oscars until unsavoury details about Parker’s past surfaced and he became an early villain of the #MeToo movement.
Emancipation finished filming in January, two months before the slap, and although it cannot have been substantially retrofitted in the editing suite, the film does helpfully support Smith’s own explanation of his behaviour.
Speaking to the late-night TV host Trevor Noah this week, Smith again made reference to his childhood in trying to explain the “bottled rage” unleashed at Rock.
“It was a lot of things,” said Smith. “It was the little boy that watched his father beat up his mother. All of that just bubbled up in that moment.”
