Harriet (2019)
Directed by Kasi Lemmons
Focus Features, 126 minutes, PG-13 (violence, racial slurs)
★★★
Harriet tells the story of one of history’s more remarkable individuals: Araminta (“Minty”) Ross (1822-1913). Don’t recognize that name? How about Harriet Tubman? That’s the name she chose when, in 1849, she fled on foot from bondage from a plantation on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and made her way to Philadelphia.
That journey would have been enough trauma for most escaped slaves, but instead Tubman became a major “conductor” on the Underground Railroad. The diminutive Tubman–she was barely 5’ tall–made 13 returns across the Mason-Dixon Line and liberated an estimated 70 slaves. Once the Fugitive Slave Act went into effect in 1850, she also helped smuggle those without freedom papers into Canada. (The Canadian Federation, as a British Commonwealth partner, abolished slavery in 1833.) Tubman went on to become the first African American woman to command Federal troops and led an 1863 raid in South Carolina that freed an additional 750 slaves.
Director Kasi Lemmons–who also cowrote the screenplay with Gregory Allen Howard–concentrates on Tubman during the years 1852-60, with a coda concerning the South Carolina raid. Kudos for casting Cynthia Erivo as Harriet. Erivo portrays Harriet as equal parts country girl, spitfire, and fiery adversary. We don’t get much information about her childhood, and the source of the visions she endured is merely alluded to. (An overseer hurled a metal weight at another slave, missed, and instead struck Harriet in the forehead. Tubman suffered painful headaches that one biographer suggests were epilepsy.) For Minty, the breaking point came when she married John Tubman in 1844. Documents surfaced that showed that she and her mother was supposed to be freed when the latter turned 45. Minty approached her master Edward Brodess, but the documents were ignored. The last straw was the sale of her three sisters, which occurred after Edward died and left his widow Eliza (country singer Jennifer Nettles, looking a lot like Amy Poehler) with crippling debt.
In Philadelphia, Minty became Harriet Tubman after meeting black abolitionist William Still (Leslie Odom, Jr.), who coordinated Underground Railroad raids. She would eventually also meet William Seward, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown. (She took part in planning for Brown’s ill-fated 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.) Tubman even returned to Maryland to liberate her husband (Zackary Momoh), only to learn he assumed Harriet was dead, had taken another wife, and didn’t wish to flee.
This is all very dramatic stuff. Lemmons assembles a good cast, but she slips when drama becomes melodrama. A major subplot involves Harriet’s dealings with Gideon Ross (Joe Alwyn). Alwyn is very good as a blue-eyed son of privilege who tries to keep Minty in line when she’s on the plantation and pursues her when she flees. There is frisson between the two that implies past closeness with hints it might have been sexual. Is Gideon looking out for her safety, or is he the Devil in disguise? It doesn’t matter; he is not an historical character. Gideon is at best a composite; at worst he’s like Harriet’s elegant Philadelphia boarding house keeper Marie Buchanon (Janelle Monáe): a complete fiction. Also on the melodramatic side is Lemmons’ elision of time. The suggestion is that Harriet was constantly bursting into Still’s office to demand another raid to free more Maryland slaves; in truth, her ventures took place over an 11-year period.
I give Lemmons a (half) pass on the latter, given that it’s very difficult to bring biography to the screen. All movie biographies shrink time and, when done well, we seldom notice. I noticed. There are a few other invented characters as well, including black slave catchers Bigger Long (Omar J. Dorsey) and Walter (Henry Hunter Hall), though such individuals were real enough.
If you don’t know very much about Tubman’s life, Harriet is a decent introduction. I would, however, encourage you not to let this film substitute for learning more. What you see on the screen can be mostly trusted, but despite its tough subject of slavery, Harriet sometimes plays against its full horror through Hallmark-like sentimental interludes. A question that constantly perplexes me is why screenwriters feel the need to embellish when history hands them ready-made drama.
As a final aside, it is important at this moment in our own history to step back from notions that African Americans freed themselves. What the Underground Railroad did was remarkable and Harriet Tubman is a personal hero, but despite a spate of works–grounded more in now than then–the total number of slaves who escaped was around 100,000. That is impressive, but a small dent in the 4 million who remained in bondage. It took a civil war to end slavery.
Rob Weir
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