An interview room is in hazy focus, and background noise rustles as a title cardappears onscreen: “It’s been a minute …,” it reads, four little words and an ellipsis tasked with some very heavy lifting. They herald a chat between old friends. We know him, and he knows us. Time has passed, too much perhaps, but we’re cool enough with each other that we can joke.

The first sign of Will Smith in the “It’s Been a Minute …” apology video he posted Friday, July 29, isn’t visual but auditory. As more of the text fades in — “Over the last few months, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and personal work. … You asked a lot of fair questions that I want to take some time to answer” — we hear an “mmhmm” and a sigh, that timeworn, instantly legible recognizablesignifier of effort and seriousness of purpose.

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Now, evidently, we are to hear a fuller explanation of, or reckoning with, the slap heard round the world, when, during the 2022 Academy Awards ceremony, Smith stalked onstage and slapped Chris Rock after the comedian made a dumb joke about the short hair of Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. (She suffers from alopecia, which disproportionately affects Black women.)

In “It’s been a minute …” we see Smith shuffle in and sit down with a grunt, coming into focus wearing a knit polo shirt and a ballcap bearing the logo of Westbrook, the entertainment company he and Pinkett Smith founded. It’s the uniform of a hardworking, mild-mannered, small business-owning dad. He’s just like one of us.

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We get no more intro. Smith begins by reading a question in the monotone of a kid forced to read aloud in class: “Why didn’t you apologize to Chris in your acceptance speech?” Ums and stutters come first. Lips purse and twitch. This, we’re supposed to understand, is a raw, vulnerable, unscripted display.

Yet there’s nothing raw about the five-minute, 44-second video, released on Smith’s YouTube channel. It’s a glossy, multi-camera shoot with smart cuts. It wants to make Smith squirm and flail just enough that we feel he’s abased himself, thus doing penance or performing contrition. But he can’t make himself look too bad, either for what he did at the Oscars or in his current faux shedding of armor, or he risks tarnishing his future projects and opportunities.

Still, something must be said and performed, the PR machine dictates, which makes “It’s been a minute …” perhaps the moment the apology video becomes an art form. A decade ago we had fuzzy, unflattering news clips of Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer apologizing for sexual offenses, wives at their sides, all studied blankness. With #MeToo, we hadterse written statements.Now the apologizer seizes control of the visual narrative.

But maybe Smith really is sorry, you might say. And maybe you’re right. But what does “sorry” mean?

Self-serving regret — wishing you hadn’t done a thing — is easy. In the video, one of Smith’s first actions after apologizing to Rock is to burden Rock by placing the ball in his court, telling us that Rock said he wasn’t ready to talk yet, a cover-your-ass move. He then apologizes to Rock’s mother, which comes off as a cheap ploy to invoke vague, warm fuzzies of a mother’s love and show that Smith respects his elders.

As Smith speaks, he gives too many syllables the same heavy emphasis, sounding like a suitcase thumping down a staircase. Sometimes he scrunches his brow and moves a clawed hand in a circular motion to show he’s thinking about that fateful moment and its consequences. “I’m not going to try to unpack all of that right now,” he then says. But if not now, then what’s the point of this video?

“There is no part of me that thinks that was the right way to behave in that moment,” he assures us, but those words serve only to distance the Will Smith we’ve known since “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” from the Will Smith of the Oscars. They say, “That was me, but that wasn’t the real me.” They avoid accountability.

Truly being sorry should be an act of empathy. It should be about putting others first, acknowledging and imagining what their hurt is like, before moving on to specific plans for ensuring nothing similar happens again. In the rest of the video, even when Smith mentions the night’s other Oscar nominees, whose glory he overshadowed, he reminds us of his own win, for“King Richard.”He says, “Disappointing people is my central trauma,” probably an allusion to Smith’s violent father, a story he delves into in his memoir “Will,” published last year.

But then comes Smith’s most sincere moment. “I’m trying to be remorseful without being ashamed of myself. I’m human, and I made a mistake, and I’m trying not think of myself as a piece of s—.” It’s a clever line, but it seeks audience sympathy for himself, not for those he hurt. “I promise you I am deeply devoted and committed to putting light and love and joy into the world,” he concludes. “If you hang on, I promise we’ll be able to be friends again.”

在the end, the video betrays a faith that just by being present and saying some things in front of a camera for a few minutes, Smith will win us over with his natural appeal and remind us of the star we’ve loved in “Bad Boys, “Men in Black,” “Independence Day” and “Ali,” the young man we’ve all watched grow up onscreen.

But the camera and star wattage can’t make everything better this time. Real-life sincerity that’s focused on other people’s well-being just might be beyond Hollywood’s storytelling powers.