Whatever his current travails, Will Smith brings a movie-star presence to this brutally violent civil war drama, with a physical stillness and defiantly steady gaze. It is inspired by the true story of “Whipped Peter”, the escaped slave who in 1863, having enlisted at a Union military camp in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, showed his horrendously scarred back to two civilian photographers there, shockingly disfigured with a lattice of raised welts and whip marks. The resulting photograph became an iconic abolitionist image: evidence of the savagery and Peter’s own heroic dignity and calm.
Smith’s Peter is not shown being whipped in this way, but it is clear that, like all the enslaved people, he has been subject to systematic cruelty, a type of racist violence that is not a distinct punitive event, but a continuous fact of life, a condition of existence. The violence is embedded in the language used as the owners have an ugly way of referring to the slaves as “it”. The movie imagines Peter to be married to Dodienne (a fierce performance from Charmaine Bingwa), with whom he speaks French dialect, but is separated from his wife and children when he is bought by another owner and put brutally to work on the south’s railroad and military fortifications. Like most of the film, this chaotic camp is shot in a bleached-out near monochrome, with flashes of flame picked out in colour: a visual approach perhaps borrowed from Schindler’s List.
