The New Yorker gave the new Civil War/Reconstruction Era film “Harriet” an enthusiastic review. In fact, it calls the Harriet Tubman biopic a “stunning achievement.” Here are a few excepts from this very positive review:
A common failure of movies, especially historical ones, is that they don’t open their drama to intellectual context or to the inner lives of their characters. Kasi Lemmons’s “Harriet” is a bold and accomplished exception: this bio-pic of Harriet Tubman develops her actions as a freer of enslaved people with ardent and detailed attention to the prophetic visions that impel her, and the intellectual and political currents, the widespread collective activity and the ideas that they embody, on which her anti-slavery activities inescapably depend. Yet the effect of this wide-ranging and deep-delving approach to an apparently straightforward and conventional narrative is gloriously paradoxical: far from dispersing the movie’s dramatic arc and energies, it focusses them. Far from diminishing its heroine’s ardent efforts, it magnifies them. In the process, the movie relates Tubman’s story, and the story of her times, with the exalted power of secular scripture.
It’s also, remarkably, a geographical drama, which does more than inscribe its action in distinctive landscapes and cityscapes: “Harriet” renders particular environments with dramatic characteristics, revealing some to be haunted and awaiting an exorcism, others to be sanctified and awaiting a consecration. With such mighty forces looming around and emanating from its protagonist, “Harriet” breaks out of the confines of its chronological span and its dramatic action to advance into the present day. Without dramatic anachronism or frame-breaking, the movie—written by Lemmons and Gregory Allen Howard—addresses more than the monstrous institution of slavery, which was officially ended in 1863. It also addresses the underlying presumption of white supremacy and its ongoing influence in American politics and culture.
“Harriet,” with cinematography by John Toll, begins with an incongruity and an atrocity: a pan shot over a lush and misty green landscape that features brown-gray wooden structures, unnaturally bare and brazenly unadorned—slave quarters, made by white overlords with conspicuous indifference to the barracks-like housing meant merely to warehouse those people they presume to own. There a woman lies, seemingly sleeping, on the bare earth: Araminta (Minty) Ross (Cynthia Erivo), an enslaved black woman who is in something like a trance, or having something like a seizure, in the course of which she has a vision, a memory of her sister being sold and dragged away from the quarters where they lived.
The setting is Bucktown, Maryland, in 1849. Minty has been given permission to marry the free black man John Tubman (Zackary Momoh). Now, after a Sunday service on the porch of the farm that’s led by a black preacher named Reverend Samuel Green (Vondie Curtis-Hall), Minty approaches her enslaver, Edward Brodess (Michael Marunde), with a claim: her mother had been promised freedom by his grandfather, and Minty saw a lawyer to enforce judgment in favor of her own freedom. He responds with rage, declaring that “a favorite slave is like a favorite pig,” says that he’ll never set her free, and threatens to sell her (which would separate her from her husband). Minty owes her relatively favored place in the Brodess farm to her religious fervor—her devoted and answered prayer for the recovery of the family’s scion, Gideon (Joe Alwyn), when he was gravely ill—but the horrific scars on her back and shoulder attest to the atrocities inflicted on her nonetheless.
Guided by her prophetic visions, Minty declares her intent in code, singing by night a song of farewell, with reference to a journey to the Promised Land and an escape from Pharaoh’s yoke, that holds a magnificent symbolic place in the movie; it’s a vision of cultural resistance and its elusive complexities. With its Biblical references, Minty’s song can “pass” in white society as abstractly beautiful and politically neutral, but for those who share her experience it’s a personal declaration, a collective affirmation, an act of revolt.
From the conclusion:
The wide-ranging and far-reaching vision of “Harriet” endows history with personal passions, deeply rooted in memory and in collective identity and experience, that fuse into an energizing and amplifying power. It’s a drama of a hero whose heroism depends crucially on that of others, of a prophet whose efforts would be empty without others of the faith, a warrior whose battles are part of a war fought by many. It’s one of the rare movies that joins the radical subjectivity of a visionary to the manifold and complex forces of the times, that fuses its story with the story of the writing of history itself, that unites the concepts of political and cultural freedom, that acknowledges the historical centrality of armed self-defense as a practical necessity and a moral right. It emphasizes the unredeemable atrocities and crimes that are minimized or even celebrated by today’s white supremacist, Confederacy nostalgists, and their political allies of convenience or ignorance. The taut dramatic arc of “Harriet” is built from the substance of complex and daring ideas.
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