CYNTHIA ERIVO HELPS ‘HARRIET’ SOAR
It’s just in the past 10 years that American movies have come to terms with slavery as an unalloyed evil. So it’s only now, after 100 years of feature films and a century and a half since the end of the Civil War, that a strong and emotionally honest film could be made about the life of Harriet Tubman.
“Harriet,” from director Kasi Lemmons, mixes in some fictional elements, but it follows the broad outline of Tubman’s story. She was born in Maryland into slavery. She escaped when she feared she might be sold off and made her way to freedom in the North. And then — this is where she steps into history — Tubman kept going back to the South, to rescue family and friends. She became known as Moses, a dreaded figure among the slaveholding classes. She led their slaves out of bondage.
In fact, Tubman should never have been a slave at all, even according to the laws that existed at the time. In an early scene, she approaches her slave master, Edward Brodess, with legal proof that she should be free, having been born to a freedman. The master looks at the document, tears it up and tells her to go back to work. He doesn’t know it, but he has just made a terrible mistake and not only in moral terms. Had he let her go, he might have spared his family a whole lot of grief.
We can read the injustice of slavery in the backs of the slaves, but we read the corruption of it in the faces and demeanors of the slaveholders. Lemmons understands this and further understands that some things are so wrong that they distort the people who commit those wrongs. Such people close off part of their souls and become perverse versions of what they might have been. Get enough people like that, thinking and doing wrong, and you have entire perverse society.
This is what Lemmons and coscreenwriter Gregory Allen Howard present here. The slaveholders are not evil so much as spiritually misshapen, out of contact with their inner truth. Thus, we see, for example, Harriet’s former mistress, Mrs. Brodess (Jennifer Nettles), panicking that all her slaves have run away. She’s in anguish and believes herself a victim. “Our stature in this community is measured by negroes!” she wails.
If such characters have lost touch with the voice inside, Harriet, as played by Cynthia Erivo, is their opposite, a visionary in contact with the essential. We learn that she sustained a head injury that cracked her skull, leaving her susceptible to headaches and spells, but also believing that God was talking to her directly, like an American Joan of Arc. Watch Erivo in this movie, and you’ll believe it, too.
Maryland and Pennsylvania are close on the map, but Harriet’s first escape required that she travel 100 miles, most of it on foot. When she finally arrives in Pennsylvania, the sky is bluer and colors are brighter. Lemmons makes Pennsylvania look like freedom. Suddenly, city streets look like normal streets, with all people going about their business, in harmony. We experience the relief of that, the sanity of it, so that when Harriet says she wants to go back to Maryland to free her family, we feel what that means. We know we feel it, because part of us wishes she would just stay in the North and relax.
When Tubman began her career in the Underground Railroad, there
was no Fugitive Slave Law. A slave from a slave state could become free just by crossing into a free state, like a German going from East to West Berlin during the Cold War. But that changed. Eventually, it wasn’t enough for Tubman to get people from Maryland to Pennsylvania. She had to get people from Maryland to Canada. This required an intricate network of abolitionists, and the movie, to some degree, touches on this fascinating aspect of history.
At times, “Harriet” is a little too romantic — never quite schmaltzy — but it feels like a movie perhaps a bit more than it should. Still, it’s effective and, at times, moving, and it has a major asset in Erivio.
Erivo is barely taller than the diminutive Tubman and seems able to look 25 or 40, at will, roughly the ages of Tubman over the course of the story. Most importantly, she exudes steadfastness and purpose. If she pointed in a direction, anyone with any sense would just shut up and follow her.