The Invincible Man

I Am Legend Directed by Francis Lawrence

As the last civilized man alive—after the Earth has been devastated by a man-made virus—Will Smith in I Am Legend attempts to repair the damage of The Legend of Bagger Vance. It was a peculiar career setback, done before Smith discovered that his innocuous screen presence (smiling, jokey rapper you can trust) could be manipulated to pop culture dominance.

Smith’s subsequent Oscar-nominated roles in Ali and The Pursuit of Happyness certainly weren’t legendary performances. In fact, last week’s tributes to Smith’s career in Time magazine and on CBS’ “60 Minutes” only concentrated on his box-office record—both conspicuously overlooking Bagger Vance’s flop. That old-style Hollywood melodrama cast Smith as an inspirational caddie, subordinate to Matt Damon’s golf hero.

Now, Smith plays the hero through I Am Legend’s remake of the 1971 Charlton Heston futuristic sci-fi thriller, The Omega Man. It’s a fascinating restructuring of cultural history that I Am Legend presents Smith as the Alpha African-American movie star. In the film’s most impassioned moment, Smith’s scientist-soldier character shouts, “I can save everybody!” Let’s anatomize this phenomenon.

VIRUS: Hollywood’s racist conventions still deny certain levels of individuality and romanticism to black male actors. Smith got to movie stardom through co-star or sidekick roles. His blockbuster resume: Independence Day, Men in Black I and II, Wild Wild West, Bad Boys I and II grossed enough money to skyrocket him through Hollywood’s glass ceiling.

Yet none of them challenged Hollywood ideology. Even Smith’s first serious role in Six Degrees of Separation subordinated him to the white liberal discontent of Stockard Channing and Donald Sutherland; playing a Hollywood-inspired con man pretending to be the son of Sidney Poitier, Smith was a black urban sociopath. Stereotype confirmed.

TRIAL: Despite the implicit mechanization of I, Robot (2004), Smith finally got a chance to address ethnic marginalization. Similarly, his voice work in Shark Tale (2004) was the first big-screen allusion to his musical career and fish-out-of-water status. Neither film equaled the social consciousness of Harry Belafonte’s comparable test-balloon movies Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) and The World, The Flesh and the Devil (1959) from the Civil Rights era. Instead, Smith’s films asserted his identity outside a recognizable social context.

INNOCULATION: I Am Legend reprises a little-observed motif from I, Robot where Smith battled strangely pigmented enemies.

After the catastrophic epidemic, humans devolve without the melanin that withstands exposure to light. These ash-white “Dark-Seekers” attack Smith in cannibalistic hoards, a surreal image with a sociological undercurrent of lynch-mob violence. When Charlton Heston fought the Dark-Seekers, they were hooded and darkly-complexioned—fearful images of the Other. Heston, in Civil Rights mode, sacrificed himself, imparting the blood of life. Smith plays military scientist Robert Neville, whose duty to save humanity is sustained against the outbreak of freakish hostility. These Dark-Seekers pointedly resemble a skinhead mob; so in the post-hip-hop era, Smith/Neville sacrifices by example of stardom.

INCUBATION: Music video director Francis Lawrence makes flashy spectacle but indifferent characterization. Sketchy flashbacks clichés fill in Smith/Neville’s background. The only contours of personality come in an ingenious moment when Neville awakes to a DVD of Shrek and recites from memory Eddie Murphy’s dialog as the cartoon Donkey. It’s a moment of brotherly recognition; Smith communicating with Murphy as a Hollywood equal and with the global movie market as a pop culture beast of burden. Both successfully maneuver through international exposure and renown.

CURE: Smith may not have the instinct for serious fare or developed the confidence to risk politically frank movies, but he has codified certain messages: Neville gets rescued from loneliness and isolation by Anna and Ethan (Alice Braga, Charlie Tahan), a woman and boy who have survived the epidemic and are seeking a safety zone; they test his belief in God and revive his allegiance to mankind.

As in the light-weight Hitch, Smith always seeks non-threatening allies—ethnically indeterminate females and children. Neville introduces Anna to Bob Marley’s recordings, describing them as “a virologist’s idea that you can cure racism by injecting music and love.” It is Will Smith’s credo.

PROGNOSIS: While I Am Legend is formulaic sci-fi action (ripping-off 28 Weeks Later) it’s only interesting as a cultural-political artifact. Scenes of post-apocalyptic New York are boiler-plate (including Neville fishing in the Met Museum’s empty Temple of Dendur pool), but the final Utopian vision of a preserved American town, complete with a white-steepled edifice, symbolizes the social ideal—the cinema as secular church—to which Smith seems committed.

The image of Smith cradling his pet dog while a lonely tear falls down his cheek confirms that his gentle stereotype is not just generic, but invincible. He’s gone from Hollywood lawn jockey to socially aware entertainer-ambassador-savior.