''Emancipation' treats the photo that inspired it as a hook for its action-movie inventions. By the end, we get a rousing climax, not even the filmmakers seem to believe,' writes Tribune critic Michael Phillips.
remake, likes to change things up visually, to the point where the style of the filmmaking is strictly a momentary thing. Likewise, cinematographer Robert Richardson toggles between silvery black-and-white, sepia tones and then sepia flecked with splashes of color,the girl in the red coat in “Schindler’s List”: orange for flames, green for comforting images of grass and trees, murky red for close-ups of wounds and the flags of both the North and South.
I couldn’t. The hooey factor gets to be too much, and it treats the indelible impact of the photo that inspired “Emancipation” as a convenient hook for its inventions. The scenes of the photography session itself are sharp, well-handled and chillingly calm — an apt ending to the story. And then the story goes on to give us a rousing climax that not even the filmmakers seem to believe.
Smith and Foster, taking on the only fully dramatized or even characterized people on screen, are very good, and both actors have the skills to suggest unimaginable horrors, inflicted or survived, without even speaking. “Things past tellin’”: In three words, one of the survivors of the slave trade, quoted in the seminal 1988 oral history “Bullwhip Days,” described our legacy of slavery.
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