As a longtime Will Smith fan, I struggled with Focus, an ostensibly just-for-fun caper movie, for reasons I couldn't pin down. The problem, I finally realized, was that I simply found Smith so opaque in the film that I couldn't sense a human being up there on the screen. That made me think about his first major film role, in Six Degrees of Separation, where he played another charlatan. And that made me think about this essay on Smith's career, which is now live on Deadspin.
