I have posted some reviews of the new Civil War/Reconstruction film “Harriet,” about the life of Harriet Tubman. Here are excerpts for several more from around the country. I provide links to the full articles:
From Rolling Stone:
Cynthia Erivo captures the spirit of Underground Railroad freedom fighter Harriet Tubman with enough ferocity and feeling to set this biopic soaring. The passionate acting of this British dynamo — a Tony winner for The Color Purple on Broadway — comes in handy when the film itself threatens to trip on its own hard-sold uplift. Harriet surely doesn’t need to push the importance of Tubman’s story to the Civil Rights movement, though it does, disappointingly and often. Luckily, Erivo is always there to remind us what counts in this dramatization of one woman’s heroic fight against the odds.
From the review’s conclusion:
It’s a big role, written with dimensions of sainthood that might defeat a lesser actor. But Erivo is up to every challenge, never losing Harriet’s compassionate humanity even as the film moves to the Civil War and pumps up the action at the expense of characterization. Tubman’s place in anti-slavery annals looms so large that her life virtually spills off the screen, as if no single movie could hold her. But there’s Erivo, hardly more than five feet tall like the dynamo she’s playing, giving us a woman in full on her march into history.
NPR has a review that reflects some disappointment in the film. From the review:
Tubman carried a pistol, as this film’s protagonist does, but her principal weapon was stealth. The script — co-written by Gregory Allen Howard, whose Remember the Titans was almost entirely fiction — invents dramatic confrontations with slave holders and trackers. These would likely have turned out much worse for Tubman that they do here. But the principal reason they feel false is that they play like bits lifted from random chase flicks, not history. Tubman is even given a moment where she rides off on a white horse.
The action scenes aren’t Harriet’s most contrived aspect, though. That would be the way Tubman periodically bursts into song, serenading her loved ones with gospel tunes that they — and everyone else on screen — somehow can’t hear. It’s as if Tubman is having a spell in a movie musical.
The film also become less convincing, and more preachy, in its final half hour, which depicts Tubman as an abolitionist celebrity. In the earlier sequences, the tight focus on Tubman — and on Erivo — energizes the generic material. Once Harriet widens to incorporate cameos by Frederick Douglass and the like, it feels more like a chapter from a history for young readers.
Vondie Curtis Hall and Henry Hunter Hall have nice moments as black men who, in very different ways, support both slavery and the people who flee it. But such ambiguity is not typical of Harriet, which is more attuned to righteousness than nuance. If the movie doesn’t burn as brightly as Tubman’s legacy, the tale it tells is illuminating nonetheless.
The Los Angeles Times has a very positive review. From the review:
Cynthia Erivo knows how to make an entrance.
In “Harriet,” her first starring film role and one she signed for before she had any big screen experience at all, the British actress galvanizes the proceedings as Harriet Tubman, a figure of rescue and resistance so legendary she is scheduled to take her place on the $20 bill.
In work that emphasizes the unstoppable power of a persuasive performance, Erivo not only convincingly conveys the strength of the celebrated abolitionist’s fierce personality, she creates her as a realistic, multi-sided character, a complex woman of formidable self-belief and not any kind of plaster saint.
If you have other reviews you would like to point to, let me know by putting them, along with a link, in our comments.
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