First Take: Where there is a Will, there is a Smith

You can’t keep a good man down, especially when he is also an actor as charismatic as Will Smith . Getting over his slapping incident Smith bounces back in Emancipation, now streaming on Apple TV+. This is a soul-stirring saga of slavery rendered great by a central performance that sears our souls, just like those horrific scars of whiplashes on Peter’s back which shook the world when a photograph was published in 1863. A lot, if not all of this is, a showreel for Will Smith’s skills as an actor. He has starved himself down to his bare bones to play Peter, who escaped slavery in Louisiana in the 1860s to wrangle his rightful freedom. [caption id=“attachment_11823341” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Will Smith[/caption] It is an epic story by any definition. However, director Antoine Fuqua is more interested in telling a thrilling  cat-and-mouse story than in actually probing the master-slave dynamics that governed slavery. Here it is Peter  against a savage white colonist Fassel (an excellent Ben Foster). If we look at the format in which the story is presented, it comes across as just another hunter-hunted thriller. This is not to say that Emancipation downplays the  scourge of slavery or trivializes it. But yes, it seriously lacks the subliminal ramifications of  Steve McQueen’s  _12 Years A Slave_  or more recently, Barry Jenkins’ The Underground Railroad. These two recent works stood out for portraying the innermost hurt, humiliation and suffering of slavery without selfpity. Emancipation too rises way above the maudlin but falls short of being the classic it is meant to be. While  subsuming the historic political offshoots of  slavery and emancipation, it fails to come to grips with the grim reality of those times when survival was an impossible  challenge. We really can’t blame writer William N Collage for whittling down the conflict and pain into an easily soluble conflict between two men. A good story is  more important to these people than historic accuracy. [caption id=“attachment_11823351” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Will Smith[/caption] Although Ben Foster as the slave driver is suitably  menacing, especially when he describes how during his  childhood he tortured and killed his (Black) nanny who had been a surrogate mother to him, the film belongs to Will Smith, who makes a spectacular comeback after the Oscars controversy. Not that he was gone anywhere. Just the year before Smith walked away with the Oscar for King Richard. The transition from King to slave is solidly bravura. This is an actor, a superstar, who will prove himself, ,no matter how. Smith’s performance as Gordon in Emancipation is a marvel of transformative acting. He is so into the character it feels as though he will never emerge from it. Is this Smith’s career-best? Probably,  though King Richard comes a close second. Ostensibly a  bio-pic on the legendary Williams sisters   of tennis, King Richard is actually a film about their Dad, a cranky, aging bully who drives his daughters around the bend convinced they are born to rule the  tennis  field. Richard Williams was right. But what if he was not right? What if Aamir Khan in  _Dangal_  was pushing his daughters into wrestling to satisfy his own  ego? At what point in one’s parental duties does push come to shove? This is  the larger question that this bio-pic  tracing the phenomenal rise to world championship of  the Williams sisters, addresses. And this is where this engrossing real-life film acquires an extra dimension. The  exploration of  the arching  relationship between  child and parent,and in this  case between  protégée and  mentor, is  explored with  surprising meticulousness. I say,  surprising , because  this is a  palpably massy production, aimed at the  maximum viewership.If King Richard  was a Bollywood production there would be songs. Sassy and insouciant, King Richard, as  the title suggests, portrays  the Williams’ sisters Venus and Serena’s father as  a despotic doer. As Will Smith, in the role  and  performance  of his lifetime, keeps saying, he knows that both the sisters are born champ material. From that moment of realization he doesn’t spare his daughters a single moment  for recreational activities  such as  boys. Conveniently  the  neighbourhood boys are shown as predatory  layabouts with nothing  to do except ogle at  girls who probably have  higher aims in life, aspirations that are largely  lacking in a community that has risen  up the social scale the hard way. While the two actresses playing Venus and Serena, Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton, are pick-perfect, this is Will Smith’s show all the way: make  no mistake about that. Smith is so brilliant in portraying an indefatigable, vicarious achiever, he not only knocks the ball out of  the court he also makes the court his stage  for a grandslam performance. A bully and an insufferably arrogant father, Smith’s Richard Williams is borderline megalomaniac. Somewhere in the self-serving daughters-pushing achiever, there is also a concerned father who dreams big for his daughters. In some ways, Will Smith reminded me of Aamir Khan in Nitesh Tiwari’s Dangal. Of course, Smith’s performance is far superior to Khan’s. Watch him in the lengthy sequence where he tells his daughter Venus about the ravages of racism that he  faced as  a child when his father left him unprotected  during a racial attack. Smith’s face is filled with pain and determination. He will see his daughters conquer the world, no matter what it takes. Where the film flounders is in delineating Richard’s relationship with his wife, played well by Aunjanue Ellis. The husband and wife’s big confrontation sequence is so clumsily written, going from recrimination to  reconciliation  with no  connecting dots, that I ended  up wondering what was the need to show the fissures in the marriage when the entire focus  of  the  plot is to  accentuate  the father’s determination to  see his daughter’s at the summit. King Richard is not without its  quota of flaws. The Daddy-knows-best mantra that runs through the narrative must have taken its toll on Venus and Serena’s self-worth. We always see the girls as obedient except once when Venus insists on a career decision suggested by her coach, played brilliantly by Jon Bernthal. Otherwise, Will Smith enjoys playing the  bossy daddy as much as we enjoy watching him play lord of the offsprings. King Richard is as much an ego trip  for Richard  Williams as it is for the actor who plays him. Will Smith is every bit  Oscar-worthy in his portrayal of a man who would be king in his daughters’ empire. But what if he had been wrong?

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. Read all the Latest News, Trending News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.