The photograph resulting from Peter’s own heroic calm and dignity, and the evidence of savagery: an iconic abolitionist image, became an image of horror. It showed Peter, who had escaped slavery and enlisted in a Union military camp in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1863, with a lattice of whip marks and raised welts disfiguring his back. This true story of “Peter Whipped” inspired the movie-star presence of Will Smith, who brings a physical stillness and steady gaze, adding a powerful presence to this brutally violent civil war drama and his current struggles.
The fact that there is a distinct type of violence that is not racist in nature, but rather a systematic cruelty, has been subjected to people like Peter Smith, who are enslaved. However, Peter is not being shown in this way of being whipped, like all the enslaved people. The ugly way of referring to slaves as “it” is embedded in the language used by the owners. In the movie “The Railway Man,” Peter is brutally put to work on the military fortifications and railroad of the south, and when he is bought by another owner, he is separated from his children and wife. This chaotic camp is shot in near bleached-out monochrome, with flashes of flame picking out the color, similar to the visual approach borrowed from the list of Schindler’s. In the movie, Peter imagines marrying Dodienne, a fierce performance by Bingwa Charmaine, who speaks in French dialect.
The commanding officers of the Union army will face a grueling ordeal in the gator-filled swamp, without any guarantee of being high-handed. Peter is disgusted by this, but he employs a black man in his adaptation of the recent TV show “Underground Railroad” as a similar slave hunter. Joel Edgerton played this familiar figure, Fassel, in a cool and unruffled manner, leading dogs and pursuing masters on horseback across the swamp, while smoking a pipe. White overseers are terrified by the rumor that Peter’s slave escapes across the swamp will make their ungovernable slaves even more unruly. The white overseers are already unnerved by the advance of the enemy and are trigger-happy, jittery, and happy in the swamp. They are electrified by the news that soldiers from Lincoln are freeing slaves in Baton Rouge, across the swamp.
The scene is unnarrated and unexplained. Is Peter lost in thought? Is he having an epiphany? His beautiful looks are evidently restrained, but the shot austerely captures its beauty. Instead of contriving a still moment when Peter looks out onto the sunlit landscape from a crude rowing boat alone, they are tempted to make scars on Peter that are equivalent to the scourging of Christ. Collage Bill and Fuqua Antoine Director carefully and reasonably tread with this religion, not born in Haiti but supposedly born in the US (perhaps he has garnered a strong Christian faith there as well), to provide a narrative quest that creates an absent family for Peter in the movie.
Is he struck by how careworn he looks, just by the strange fact of his own existence and survival again? For the first time in a long time in his adult life, he catches a glimpse of himself in a mirror, running into the house in search of food; there is a great moment when he stumbles into a burning plantation, left in surreal ruins. The movie works efficiently as a thriller, with Peter on the run from his pursuers elsewhere.
Perhaps the final showdown with the hated Fassel is anticlimactic, considering that this is a strong, fierce, and heartfelt movie, but it has come before the third act of Peter’s military enlistment.