Mark Reviews Movies: HARRIET

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 1, 2019

With the story and epilogue of Harriet, one realizes that a biographical movie could drop in at almost any point in the life of Harriet Tubman, who was born a slave, escaped from her captors, and risked death or capture to rescue about 70 others held in enslavement. That's the story co-writer/director Kasi Lemmons chooses to tell with this movie, which involves a broad outline of this part of Tubman's life and paints its protagonist in a similar manner.

This Harriet, who was born Araminta Ross and is called "Minty" by those who know her before she escaped, is a woman determined to be free and, then, to free as many people as she can. That ends any exploration of the character, save for her "spells," during which she faints and has, according to her understanding, divinely sent visions of the future. Lemmons and co-writer Gregory Allen Howard turn their version of Harriet into religiously minded but fully secular saint, which is certainly an accurate view by just about any historical measure. As the heroine of a story that itself only has one goal in mind, though, the character comes across as just a bit too inflexible for any real drama to emerge from this biography.

Here, Harriet is played by Cynthia Erivo, in an impassioned and often commanding performance that makes one wonder what she could have been done with an even stronger, more evolving character on the page. As it stands, though, Erivo is practically perfect for this iteration of the character—devoutly faithful, stridently single-minded, willing to sacrifice almost anything, including herself, if it means that one other person can experience even a moment of the freedom that she has felt.

The movie briefly shows Minty, before taking the name Harriet upon arriving in Philadelphia, as a slave on the farm of Brodess family. She has married John Tubman (Zackary Momoh), a slave on a nearby farm, and, with her husband and freeman father Ben's (Clarke Peters) help, has obtained a letter from an attorney, stating that her mother Rit (Vanessa Bell Calloway) and all of the family were intended to be freed upon the mother's 45th birthday. The family scoffs at the notion, and shortly after Minty wishes that the family patriarch be struck dead if his mind will not change, the family patriarch dies.

His son Gideon (Joe Alwyn), who has known and resented Minty (because she seemed to show signs of caring about him as a human being) since they both were children, is preparing to sell Minty. If she is to be separated from her family, it will be on her terms.

With the help of a local minister (played by Vondie Curtis-Hall), she makes the hundred mile trek, essentially on her own, from Maryland to Philadelphia, leaving behind her family and husband. In the northern city, Minty is received by anti-slavery activist William Still (Leslie Odom Jr.), takes her new name, and finds a place to stay, as well as a paying job, with the aid of Marie Buchanon (Janelle Monáe). The rest of the movie details Harriet's repeated trips back to Maryland, where she attempts and usually succeeds to free the rest of her family, with some notable exceptions, and others looking to escape along the way.

That's the barebones history of this chapter of the real Tubman's life, and Lemmons and Howard certainly do not attempt to flesh it out any further than that. Obviously, the local farmers come to hate Harriet, who is only known as a mysterious figure nicknamed "Moses," and that hatred is simplistically personified by Gideon, who spends the rest of the story with a personal vendetta against Moses, who just happens to be the escaped slave with whom he already possesses a personal vendetta. The character primarily serves the purposes of giving the movie an easy-to-identify villain and of ensuring that the story can be equally simplified to a years-long chase.

Accompanying his hunt are Bigger Long (Omar J. Dorsey), a black man who has become the South's most renowned slave-catcher, and Walter (Henry Hunter Hall), another black man who is a skilled tracker but, upon witnessing Harriet's leadership, decides to help her. The inclusion of these characters, although certainly possible in terms of history, is odd to say the least, but again, it definitely reinforces the narrative's simplicity.

As for Harriet, simplicity is also the goal in that regard. The character begins as one who desires, but does not have the ability to speak openly of, freedom, and once she is free, freedom again becomes the her sole purpose in life. She almost seems born to lead, since at no point does she ever learn to be a leader (It falls upon her in a river-crossing scene, and then it becomes the definition of the character).

One cannot argue with the concept of beatifying Tubman, whose courage and leadership are beyond reproach. In combining that view of a character within a drama with the one-dimensional narrative on display here, though, Harriet keeps the eponymous heroine at a certain distance. As the epilogue explains, there were multitudes to this woman and her accomplishments. We're left with only a piece of them.

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