Review by Courtney Anderson
Harriet Tubman is an American hero who has never been properly celebrated. Most U.S. History books simplify Tubman’s story so much that it can fit into two paragraphs on the one-page elaboration on the Underground Railroad. If you ask most people who Harriet Tubman is, they’ll blurt out some phrase about her “freeing the slaves.” They likely won’t know about her time as a spy for the Union during the Civil War, or about her leading the armed expedition known as the Combahee River Raids. A couple of years back, the possibility of Tubman becoming the new face of the $20 bill brought her back into public conversation, but it was only for a short time.
The idea of a feature-length film about Harriet Tubman is thrilling. It’s also long overdue, considering that she’s only made a couple of appearances on the screen before (she was portrayed by Cicely Tyson in a miniseries called “A Woman Called Moses” and then portrayed by Aisha Hinds in the short-lived series “Underground”). When I learned that Kasi Lemmons, who directed Eve’s Bayou (a.k.a the movie I love the most) was set to co-write and direct a film about Harriet Tubman, I was ecstatic.
And then the casting was announced.
There’s been much discussion about the controversy surrounding Cynthia Erivo being cast as Harriet Tubman. While some people were perturbed by the fact that a Black British actress was cast to play such an integral figure in Black-American history, others – myself included – were disturbed by resurfaced tweets in which Erivo made derogatory statements about Black Americans. Erivo’s responded to the criticism about her casting, but it’s hard to forget about those old tweets when she and her co-star Janelle Monae manage to draw even more ire by insinuating that more Black Americans would vote if Popeyes locations included voting registration booths.
As if the film’s star didn’t concern me enough, less than stellar reviews started to roll in. The things I was reading clashed with my view of Kasi Lemmons and her extraordinary body of work. I’d grown to view Kasi Lemmons as a director dedicated to unflinching, multi-layered portrayals of Black people – Black women, particularly. And here I was, reading reviews that claimed Harriet was the exact opposite. But I pushed all of those worries as far away as I could when I sat down to watch Harriet; I figured that I should judge the movie independently of the noise surrounding it.
My problem is that the movie itself isn’t very good.
For reasons that I can’t discern, Lemmons and crew made the most sanitized movie possible, resulting in a Harriet Tubman film that doesn’t humanize Tubman or even teach us very much about her. Harriet feels less like a movie and more like a video-version of Harriet Tubman’s Wikipedia page. I walked out of the movie thinking that we still didn’t know anything about who Harriet Tubman really was.
And yes, I realize that there are some things that we can never know, but this movie doesn’t even seem to try to figure it out. Harriet Tubman’s characterization is limited to two emotional states: fiercely determined and heartbroken. It doesn’t help that Cynthia Erivo’s emotional range is surprisingly lacking here; she has a deer-in-headlights expression on her face for a lot of the movie that she occasionally exchanges for a furrowed brow and a high chin.
The movie squanders every opportunity to make Harriet Tubman a real person. We don’t see much of her physical journey to freedom. Harriet Tubman basically fast-travels from Maryland to Philadelphia on foot in this movie. We have to be told that she made an unprecedented 100 miles to freedom alone. There’s only one scene involving Harriet jumping off of a bridge that highlights how dangerous the journey was, but to be honest, that scene is ruined by an exaggerated musical score and cringe-worthy dialogue.
The movie didn’t even use Harriet Tubman’s physical ailments to humanize her. When Harriet Tubman was 13, she was struck in the head with a weight, leaving her with a physical scar and epilepsy. Tubman would suffer from seizures that would cause her to lose consciousness. Ever since I learned that fact about her, I’ve always wondered how she managed to travel hundreds and hundreds of miles back and forth to freedom while suffering from seizures. I’ve wondered how anyone could’ve possibly survived that journey.
I didn’t get the answer from this movie. Instead of showing Tubman’s seizures, Lemmons and crew decided to transform the seizures into literal psychic visions. Throughout the film, Harriet would faint and have a vision that would show her the way to go. She attributes these visions to God. She even has a line of dialogue expressing gratitude for getting her skull busted open because it helped her “hear God’s voice” more clearly. It’s a disturbing change that strips the movie of humanity and replaces it with a weird spirituality that makes the movie much more saccharine than it needed to be.
Pretty much every aspect of this movie is flattened, oversimplified or covered in a layer of cheese. All the supporting characters are one-note and uncompelling, which is incredibly disappointing for a film about a group of people who operated the Underground Railroad and helped Harriet Tubman free nearly hundreds of enslaved people. The movie felt like a complete waste of Janelle Monáe and Leslie Odom Jr.; Terence Blanchard’s score was lovely at first, but then it started to get in the film’s way, adding overly-dramatic tone to scenes that really needed to be somber and quiet.
And while I’m not too keen on watching extremely graphic scenes of violence, I found it very odd that there’s actually very little violence in the film. The horrors of slavery are stated, but not shown. The most brutal scene is reserved for the murder of Janelle Monáe’s character, Marie Buchanan, at the hands of a Black slave-catcher whom Harriet’s former owner’s son has hired to catch her. It’s disconcerting that, in a film that should be about the spine-chillingly horrifying nature of white supremacy, the most violent scene is a scene where a Black man kills a Black woman.
The Black slave catcher thing really threw me for a loop: while Black slave catchers did exist and cause a whole lot of problems for fugitive enslaved people, this movie portrays its Black slave catcher as more violent and menacing than the white slaver who has hired him. There’s a moment in the film that has caused a lot of debate about whether or not the slaver can be considered a “white saviour.” Towards the end of the film, the white slaver shoots and kills the Black slave catcher because the Black slave catcher is trying to kill Harriet Tubman. Now, I don’t think the slaver could be considered a “saviour,” because the only reason he’s stopping Harriet’s murder is because he wants to re-enslave her and do horrible things to her. But it is very uncomfortable to watch a scene where this white man slaves Harriet’s life from the brutish Black man. It doesn’t help that Harriet ends up letting this white slaver live, despite the fact that he’s spent the entire movie stalking and endangering her. It’s just another part of the movie that doesn’t feel quite right.
I really wanted Harriet to be a good film. I’d really hoped that the movie could rise above the controversies that marred it before it even premiered. Harriet Tubman’s story is so amazing and unfathomable, and I really wanted a film that did right by her.
Harriet isn’t that film. Maybe we just aren’t going to ever get it.