“I’m trying to fix my mind,” says Will Smith at one point in his new movie, Collateral Beauty. It’s accompanied by that quizzical crinkling of the eyebrows he does a lot these days, where it looks like he is trying to frown and look surprised at the same time. Unfortunately, the problem goes deeper than just his mind, or his eyebrows, or even this film: Smith has got a lot to fix right now.
In 2009, he was ranked the “most bankable star” on the planet by Forbes, on account of his power to get movies made, and to make those movies hugely profitable. But Collateral Beauty has been the biggest flop of his career, taking a paltry $7 million (Dh25.7 million) worldwide on its opening weekend. You would have to rack your brains to remember his last hit as a leading man — or even the last time you saw him smile.
It must be said that Collateral Beauty is one shockingly awful, emetically treacly, self-help tear-jerker. Smith plays a philosopher-marketing-guru type who is sent into a tailspin by the death of his six-year-old daughter. He writes letters to the abstract qualities he used to be fond of citing in his motivational speeches: Time, Love and Death. “
This is ... therapeutic,” says his perceptive colleague Kate Winslet, who has hired a private detective to intercept the letters. So his co-workers hire some amateur actors to play Time, Love and Death and go to talk to Smith — because, of course, there is no better way to heal a friend’s grief than convincing him that he is insane.
You do not need to know the rest, but what Collateral Beauty brings home is how miserable Smith seems these days. He seems to be on a complete downer. Even as Deadshot in this summer’s Suicide Squad, ostensibly a fun comic-book movie, Smith was again morose and crinkly eyebrowed with guilt over his daughter.
Before that he was a Nigerian doctor taking on the NFL in Concussion, who talked to dead football players and took care to be deadly earnest at all times. In Seven Pounds, he glumly performed random acts of kindness to strangers, all the while concealing some deep personal sadness (“I haven’t treated myself very well,” he confessed). The Fresh Prince has become the sad king.
Before asking what went wrong, it bears remembering how right it has gone for Smith hitherto. Even before he had it all, he always looked like someone who was going to get it. He cut his first record before he left high school and was living the rap-star life before he turned 20 (at least till the tax office caught up with him).
As an actor, he had the perfect origin story in the form of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, a semi-autobiographical sitcom in which Smith’s charming, cocky, streetwise persona shook up polite, moneyed Los Angeles. Smith, the son of respectable Philadelphia Baptists, was never really a graffiti-spraying hood rat. But The Fresh Prince doled out the same fantasy of social mobility that Smith appeared to be living for real off-screen. It was like he had won the golden ticket in life — and that aura of charmed existence stuck with him.
By the late 90s, Smith was, as he put it in his single Just Cruisin’, “the eclectic female attractor, rapper-slash-actor”. Everything he touched seemed to be a hit. And even when it wasn’t (such as Wild, Wild West) Smith shimmied out of the wreckage with barely a dent in his box office appeal — that is the true mark of a bankable star.
That and calling your album Big Willie Style and not being laughed out of town.
You do not get to this position by accident. Not even by talent or ambition. Smith certainly had those, but he also had a plan. In the early 90s, Smith later revealed, he sat down with his manager and figured out exactly what he needed to do to become the biggest movie star in the world. Together they analysed what the highest-grossing movies had in common: special effects, creatures, a love story. So, that was what he did. Independence Day, Men in Black, Enemy of the State, Bad Boys, Wild Wild West, I, Robot. It wasn’t about the art; it was about the product, the numbers, the objective, the brand.
There seemed to be no ceiling to Smith’s career. By 2010, he and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, were interviewing Barack Obama and hosting the president’s Nobel Peace Prize concert. Smith had earned his second Oscar nomination two years earlier (for The Pursuit of Happyness; the first was for Ali). He was one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood. And he was adored by the public. He couldn’t walk around the block without causing a traffic jam. Meanwhile, his 12-year-old son Jaden was starring in a hit remake of The Karate Kid (produced by daddy). And 10-year-old daughter Willow was launching her music career with the school-disco floor-filler Whip My Hair. The Obamas, it seemed, had competition for America’s First Family.
The post-apocalyptic mess
In retrospect, that was Peak Smith. Or Before After Earth, as historians will one day call it. The title was prophetically terrestrial for a movie that brought Smith plummeting back down to the ground. There was no walking away from this one: After Earth was Smith’s magnum opus, and a family vanity project. He conceived it, wrote it, produced it (with Jada), mostly directed it (with help from M Night Shyamalan), and starred in it alongside Jaden. It looked like he had gothis grandma to do the sets, too.
A pompous, po-faced, post-apocalyptic mess, After Earth’s charge sheet is too long to summarise: terrible CGI, terrible acting, terrible dialogue, terrible everything. Worse still, Smith played a stern military father who remotely monitors and dictates his son’s every move after they crash on a hostile future Earth — a dynamic that uncomfortably mirrored Smith’s own attempt to position Jaden as a viable Hollywood leading man. It most likely achieved the opposite. It was the first Will Smith summer movie in 20 years not to open at No 1 at the box office.
You could say the knives were out for Team Smith after that, but their wounds were largely self-inflicted. There was the bizarre joint interview in New York Magazine, where Smith declared: “I’m a student of patterns. At heart, I’m a physicist.”
And Jaden answered a question about being responsible about money with: “I like Cartier.” Or the even more bizarre interview Jaden and Willow gave the New York Times in 2014, where they spoke about “prana energy”, being able to control time, and writing their own novels rather than reading other people’s. They were literally too cool for school. “I went to school for one year,” said Willow. “I was, like: ‘Oh, now I know why kids are so depressed.’”
Instead, the Smith kids attended the New Village Leadership Academy, a private, alternative institution founded and funded by their parents. Smith senior has always claimed to be secular, but the school’s teaching methods were heavily influenced by the philosophies of L Ron Hubbard, it was revealed, which cast further light on Smith’s links with Scientology over the years.
Far from being First Family candidates, the Smiths were starting to look like a sinister breeding programme for future messiahs.
“After the failure of After Earth, a thing got broken in my mind,” Smith told reporters last year. And here we are, still waiting for him to fix it. He seems to have had a reassessment. He stopped working for a year and a half. “I had to dive into why it was so important for me to have No 1 movies,” he said.
He has told the story several times of how he was motivated to conquer the world after being cheated on by a girl when he was 15. “All I have to do is make sure that no one’s ever better than me and I’ll have the love that my heart yearns for.” It doesn’t sound like the whole story, but the failure of After Earth prompted “a mature way of looking at the world and my artistry and love”.
One thing that is barely mentioned in Smith’s story, but needs to be, is the fact that he is a black man. In many respects, that adds to his accomplishments. Smith has achieved what previous generations of African American entertainers could barely dream of — almost to the extent where his race is an irrelevance to his roles. “If a movie makes more than $100 million, some black people stop being black — they become Will Smith,” Lenny Henry recently joked.
It is not clear whether he meant it as an insult or a compliment.
Playing the race game
Smith was the embodiment of that brief moment, early on in Obama’s first term, when America imagined itself to be “post-racial”, but, as you would expect, he has played a very careful game. His characters are invariably just black enough to please black audiences, but not so black as to frighten white audiences. His standard persona, from the Fresh Prince onwards, has been cool, streetwise, quick-witted, naturally talented, fun-loving but in no way threatening — physically, politically orsexually. His music is the same — inoffensive, clean, “fun”.
Smith has often distanced himself from race issues. “The execs don’t care about what colour you are; they care about how much money you make,” he once said. Earlier this year, he raised eyebrows by professing that “racism is actually rare”. But it’s no coincidence Smith has rarely had a white love interest on screen. The movies were not so post-racial, after all. Even in his romcom Hitch, the studios reportedly pushed Latina Eva Mendes as his partner rather than first choice Cameron Diaz, on the grounds that white audiences still don’t like seeing black men kissing white women. His 2015 movie Focus, with Margot Robbie, was the first time he actually did so.
More often, Smith is partnered with white men, usually older, grumpier, more authoritative ones who co-opt him into the status quo. The classic example is Men In Black, where Tommy Lee Jones inducts him as a secret government operative, symbolically replacing his bright, urban streetwear with an anonymous business suit.
“You’ll not stand out in any way,” Jones tells Smith. “Your entire image is crafted to leave no lasting memory with anyone you encounter.” Smith gets a final quip in: “You know the difference between you and me? I make this look good.”
It was a similar story in Enemy of the State, Wild Wild West, Independence Day (to some extent), and the egregious 1930s drama The Legend of Bagger Vance, in which he played Matt Damon’s “magical negro” golf caddie.
As Spike Lee remarked of the film: “Black men were being castrated and lynched left and right... With all that going on, why are you [expletive] trying to teach Matt Damon a golf swing?”.
Practically the only exceptions in Smith’s career have been the Bad Boys films, where he partnered with Martin Lawrence, and the real anomaly, Ali, in which he immersed himself in a role rather than playing another variation on the Smith persona. And played a politically active African American icon to boot. And he did it very well.
That is the part Smith can’t fix himself: he has forgotten what he is actually good at. That “mature way of looking at the world” has so far translated into roles in which he is miserable, confused and hurting, as if we are all going to take pity on him — or at least consider him a serious actor. It’s not working.
Hopefully the failure of Collateral Beauty will finally hammer that home. We don’t want Sad Will, we want Jiggy-Wit-It Will! We want the confident, cocky, charming, funny Will. We want action-comedy Will.
Now that the last tatters of “post-racial” America have been stomped into the ground by the incoming Trump presidency, fixing Smith ought to be a national priority. The country needs figures who can heal the divisions, who can talk to everyone, who can embody a semblance of an American Dream that is not based on bigotry or bitterness. We need to Make Will Great Again.
There are signs of hope. Two sequels to Bad Boys are in the works. He is also getting off the fence politically. Following the lead of his wife, he boycotted the Oscar ceremony last year in support of #OscarSoWhite.
His family foundation has also donated to black and racial equality causes, including $150,000 to Justice or Else! campaign last year.
There is one obvious way all of this could come together for Smith: the desire for serious roles, commercial clout, political respectability, personal achievement, the easy charm: a Barack Obama biopic. Surely there is no better candidate? No surprises, strategically minded Smith has already spoken to Barack about playing him. Obama told him he had the ears for it, apparently. He just needs to sort out those eyebrows and we will be good to go.
