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Harriet review
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Harriet

The only known portraits of Harriet Tubman are that of her in steely resolve in her old age, and they provide only a small glimpse of a towering figure. But this movie is not quite the addendum or correction to that incomplete vision. Not by a long shot.

 

Harriet removes Tubman’s numerous achievements from the earthly to that of the magical realist. This does a great disservice to her story as it makes her merely a saintly pawn in a cosmic journey. It’s easy to stare in awe of her daring when it treats her alleged communions with god as literal fact and provides her journey with the safety bumpers endemic to biographical films.

 

From the first scene it is obvious that Harriet is going to be unconcerned with the historical record in a profound way. If you watch enough of these awards-bait movies you’ll notice when things are clearly engineered for clear three acts, saintly heroes, black hat villains, and Harriet falls into every single one of these traps. Its artifice is palpable and noticeable, like Joe Alwyn’s ever-chasing plantation owner’s son and a black slave catcher that exist to be hissed at and provide plainly designated things for Harriet to act against.

 

Her story didn’t need these patently false creations and it undercuts the triumph of her story by essentially crafting an AU for such an important historical figure getting her first big screen treatment. Harriet Tubman becomes a Joan of Arc type by adhering so strongly to these dreamscapes and treating them as literal prophecy instead of juxtaposing them against all the planning and support network that went into Tubman’s daring returns to the south. There’s no insight here beyond a surface-level acceptance of historical tidbits as literal truth and facts.

 

Yes, Tubman did experience what she believed to be visions from God as the result of a traumatic brain injury in her youth. But by continually zipping back to the blue-tinted spirit world and undercutting Cynthia Erivo’s stoic, gritty performance, director Kasi Lemmons turns her into an unknowable, revisionist superheroine that we never for a minute believe is in any danger. What this movie needed was less religiosity and more humanity.

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Added by JxSxPx
4 years ago on 28 February 2020 21:27