Movie Review: 'Harriet' a Biopic on Run-away Slave and Black Liberator Harriet Tubman

  Official Movie Trailer (2:48 min) 

 

Harriet

Kasi Lemmons’ Harriet features Cynthia Erivo in the title role, as the great abolitionist and political activist Harriet Tubman (c. 1822-1913). It is to Lemmons’ credit that she has made Tubman’s life her subject matter. There has been a dearth of films devoted to Tubman, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Wendell Phillips and other anti-slavery opponents, representatives of a profoundly egalitarian and democratic tradition.

Tubman’s life and times raise issues of an essentially revolutionary character. However, Lemmons, a veteran actress and director of several films ( Eve’s Bayou, The Caveman’s Valentine, Talk to Me, Black Nativity), turns in a relatively limited work. The tumultuous social dynamic of the Civil War period is largely absent.

Cynthia Erivo in Harriet

The film’s biography of Tubman begins in 1849, when she is a slave in Maryland known as “Minty” whose master refuses to grant her freedom despite legal documents entitling her to that. Her owner dies, but his cruel son Gideon (Joe Alwyn) now wants to sell her. She escapes from slavery at the age of 27, making a perilous journey to Philadelphia, where she meets the abolitionist William Still (Leslie Odom Jr.) and changes her name to Harriet Tubman.
Despite the relative safety of her new condition, Harriet, as “Moses,” makes 13 harrowing expeditions to the South to rescue approximately 70 slaves, including her brothers, Henry, Ben, and Robert, their wives and some of their children. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 is passed, she helps guide fugitives into Canada, using the network of safe houses and clandestine routes known as the Underground Railroad.

When the Civil War breaks out, Harriet becomes a scout and spy for the Union Army. As the first woman to head an armed expedition in the war, she leads a raid at Combahee Ferry, in South Carolina, liberating more than 750 slaves, many of whom joined the Northern forces.
The makers of Harriet, despite sincere intentions, skim the surface of Tubman’s life and times, creating a relatively bland, rather than appropriately electrifying work.

When an early biography of Tubman was being prepared in 1868, the legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote to her:

“The difference between us is very marked. Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day—you in the night … The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism. Excepting John Brown [for whose October 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, Tubman helped recruit men]—of sacred memory—I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have.”