Summary
Minty is a married slave who runs away when she suspects her master is going to sell her down south from where slaves don’t ever return. When she manages to make her escape to the Free North she changes her name to Harriet Tubman and dedicates herself to freeing as many slaves as possible.
The Film
While this film is about an admirable woman, one who should be admired and hero-icised, and whose story should be told through cinema this movie is not that film and I can’t say I recommend it to any except the young who may need a first introduction to the ideas and people found within it but without the harshest scenes of violence you might normally expect to find in a film like this one.
Unfortunately, as a person who grew up with graphic representations of what slavery truly was as well as near constant education on the evils of slavery and the heroes who fought to end it either for themselves or others. This omission also leaves the film feeling trite and small, not dealing with the harshness of slavery nor the emotional turmoil of the principle characters in the story in a way that feels true. It feels put on or dressed up.
The movie is poorly written. It doesn’t seem to be plotted according to emotional movement of the internal character. Instead, it feels like someone opened a history book and took the paragraphs about Harriet Tubman’s life and decided to make each sentence a scene of the film. Luckily there are no shortage of celebrities to play these roles.
Unfortunately, there were times in the film where it felt like the only reason Harriet (Cynthia Erivo, “Widows”) was talking to, say, Marie Buchanan, was because Janelle Monae (“Moonlight”) was playing her and not because that scene was true to life (though it might be) or important to Harriet’s growth (again, though it might be). The latter part of the film is all about how she helped free more than 70 slaves from captivity but it is all told in montage form. We see her and others running through the woods, dogs chasing them, white men beating down the roads on horseback but never do we learn anything about those slaves, their masters, why freeing them was hard, what the logistics were, or how close they got to being caught.
Compare that to a film like “Schindler’s List” where you can count the people and names of those who were saved and everyone can remember how that one boy almost got caught in the latrines because there was no room for him in the pit beneath it. I would have loved to see a film which covers her escape in the first half hour or forty-five minutes but the rest is all about the various breaks she leads from the plantations. A real Hero Freedom Fighter picture full of heroism.
It seems the movie just wasn’t thought out that much. The entire film feels very paint by number down to the costuming which seems OK at first glance but there isn’t a stitch of clothing in this film that I believe was actually made or worn by anyone in the 1800s and I have to say the same for almost every other aspect of this film.
If this is a movie for the young and I’m being overly harsh, I apologize, but when a film is getting Oscar buzz I expect that it will be something more competent than the simplistic stories of Martin Luther or Jesus that I watched when I was a kid. I certainly hoped that I would be seeing a serious treatment of an important story and subject matter but I guess that was too much to ask.
I have to say that I am really disappointed in this film. The trailers looked bad to me but with the talk around Cynthia Erivo’s performance, which is very good, I was thinking I had maybe misjudged the film by its trailer. Alas, the trailer was true to the film and while I think Erivo is a very fine actress and delivers a good performance as Harriet, I am also looking forward to seeing her in a film that is worthy of her as much as I am to a film worthy of the name “Harriet.”
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