Will Smith finds redemption in Emancipation but does he deserve an Oscar?

Nine months after he slapped Chris Rock at the Academy Awards Will Smith is back as a slave on the run in Black Lives Matter movie Emancipation. The verdict is in.

Should Will Smith be nominated for his performance in Emancipation? Picture: Apple TV+

Emancipation (MA15+)
Apple TV+

★★★★

Can Will Smith win an Oscar for the American Civil War-set drama Emancipation, his first film since he slapped Chris Rock at the Academy Awards ceremony in March?

Don’t write him off. That slap almost obliterated the fact he was named best actor that night for King Richard, the drama about tennis star sisters Serena and Venus Williams and their father.

Here’s a scene from Emancipation that might flash on the screen on Oscars night: Smith, a slave named Peter, recounts the physical and mental torture he has endured.

While his bones have been broken, “they never, never break me”. This goes to the title. Emancipation is a state of mind.

The movie opens with Peter, his wife Dodienne (Charmaine Bingwa) and their four young children slaving on a cotton plantation. They are in their hut and Peter is bathing his wife’s feet as the children look on.

They know their lives can be changed – by others, not themselves – at any moment. Peter says the lord is with them. “I cannot be afraid. What can mere men do to me?”

That question is answered when three men barge into the hut and pull Peter from his family. He has been sold to another slave owner in Louisiana.

He fights, he bites, he grips the door frame so hard he pulls it apart. But they drag him out and put him in a caged cart. He promises his family, “I will come back to you”.

Fast-forward, and Peter is on the run. When he approaches a Southern mansion, the white family is seated for lunch on the porch. They say grace.

Imani Pullum, Will Smith, Jeremiah Friedlander, Landon Chase Dubois, Charmaine Bingwa and Jordyn McIntosh in Emancipation

When a girl, six or so, spots Peter. She yells, “Runner! Runner! Runner!” and rings a bell hung on the porch. It’s a telling moment that goes to what this movie is about.

It’s about the unforgivable inhumanity of slavery, yes, but it’s more nuanced than that. It’s about how that inhumanity crosses such thin lines.

Peter and the white girl believe in the same god. This near-incomprehensible hatred between like and like permeates every shot of the film, which is in muted colours, mostly grey.

This is the right choice for this movie, which is full of savage brutality. It also reinforces the central message. This is a Black Lives Matter movie that’s also about how all lives matter.

Smith is outstanding in the lead role and the director (Antoine Fuqua) and scriptwriter (William N. Collage) have made a powerful film.

But the stand-out star is cinematographer Robert Richardson, who has three Oscars to his name for Oliver Stone’s JFK and Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator and Hugo.

Should he win a fourth for Emancipation, he will become the most Oscar-ed cinematographer. At present he’s tied with Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now, Reds, The Last Emperor) and Emmanuel Lubezki (Gravity, Birdman, The Revenant).

The atmospheric opening shots of Peter and other slaves being carted into Louisiana, where they are to build a railroad for the Confederate army, are harrowing.

The cart passes a long line of the decapitated heads of slaves stuck on sticks. This is what happens to “runners”, as the white girl called them.

Cart horse hooves, then the feet of chained men, plough through mud. Then the makeshift army hospital, a hellscape of amputations and screaming. Later, when we see the Union army, it’s the same mud, the same horrific hospital scenes. The muted colours almost blend Union blue and Confederate grey. The battle scenes, shot with a wide angle, are brutally superb.

As mentioned earlier, there is a moment when Peter escapes.

He races through swampland, with slave hunter Fassell (an intense Ben Foster) and his dogs in pursuit.

This extended sequence highlights the action-adventure skills of the director, who is best known for the 2001 crime thriller Training Day. What happens here, though, is far more real.

The inspiration for this film is a slave known as “The Scourged Black” or “Whipped Peter”. His scarred body made headlines when photographs of him appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1863, two years into the Civil War.

Those headlines matter more than the “Slap-Gate” ones. I don’t think Will Smith will win an Oscar for this film, but only because I believe it should go to Austin Butler as the lead in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis.

I do think he should be nominated. The Oscar is for an actor’s performance in a film – no more, no less – and Smith’s deserves due recognition.

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Pinocchio (M)
Netflix
★★★½

As the M rating suggests, the animated movie Pinocchio, directed and co-written by Guillermo del Toro, is not a children’s story.

This is a dark take on the adventures of the wooden puppet who wants to be a real boy. It’s about loss, grief, sadness and abuse. The comic side – the nose that grows with lies – is there but not central.

The Mexican filmmaker won Oscars (best director, best picture) for The Shape Of Water (2017), a romantic fantasy inspired by the 1954 horror movie The Creature From The Black Lagoon.

As with that film, del Toro brings his own perspective to the life of the rascally marionette created in 1883 by Italian writer Carlo Collodi.

In one interview, the director said his deepest personal connection was with Pinocchio. He also compared Collodi’s novel to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which came out near 70 years earlier. Dr Victor Frankenstein’s monster was, of course, misunderstood.

Perhaps no surprise then that when Pinocchio (voiced by Gregory Mann) is brought to life by a wood sprite (Tilda Swinton), an electric-like pulse runs through his pine body.

The story is narrated by Sebastian J. Cricket (Ewan McGregor), a memoir-writing, moustachioed insect who lives inside Pinocchio’s hollow body.

When the wood sprite tells him he is to be the wooden boy’s guide through life, he retorts, in one of the funnier moments: “I am not a governess, madam, I’m a novelist”.

The director started his career in animation and this movie is a love letter to that form. The stop-motion animation, co-directed by Mark Gustafson, is beautiful to look at. It feels real. There are moments that bring a tear to the eye.

Pinocchio, like Frankenstein’s monster, is misunderstood. First by the woodcarver who made him, Geppetto (David Bradley), who describes him as a burden, then by the local fascist official (Ron Perlman), who thinks he will be the ideal Italian soldier. That goes to the significant change in setting. It unfolds in pre-World War II Italy and the fascists are pulling the strings. It’s the people who become, willingly or otherwise, puppets.

Pinocchio, however, starts to think for himself, which makes him dangerous. Tom Kenny AKA SpongeBob SquarePants has a fun cameo as Benito Mussolini.

The real baddie, though, is a down-on-his-heels aristocrat Count Volpe (Christoph Waltz, hamming it up). He runs a circus and wants the living puppet to be his star act. His male monkey, Spazzaturu, who he mistreats, is voiced by Cate Blanchett, though more in shrieks and grunts than words.

The script, full of metaphors, does drift a bit over 115 minutes. But the constant is a deep sadness. It’s there from the opening when Geppetto’s real son, Carlo, dies in the bombing of a church during World War I.

This tragic back story, only suggested in the novel and previous film adaptations, underpins this movie. It’s a loss Geppetto barely survives.

Pinocchio wants to be the new Carlo but can anyone be replaced – and should anyone, even a boy made of pine, try to be someone they are not? It’s clear del Toro knows the novel, which has its share of sinister characters. This movie is not devoid of hope but it’s a melancholic kind. “What happens happens,’’ the cricket says, “and then we are gone.”

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio - (L-R) Pinocchio (voiced by Gregory Mann) and Count Volpe (voiced by Christoph Waltz)