Kasi Lemmons (2019)
Araminta Ross (1822-1913), was born into slavery in Dorchester County, Maryland. Around 1844, she married John Tubman, a freedman, but in 1849 escaped alone to Philadelphia, where she became Harriet Tubman. She returned repeatedly to Maryland to rescue family, friends and other enslaved people. Working as part of the ‘Underground Railroad’, a network of abolitionist activists, she guided some seventy slaves to freedom. During the American Civil War, she joined the Union Army and became the first woman to lead an armed expedition, in the 1863 raid at Combahee Ferry, which resulted in the liberation of more than seven hundred slaves. In the second half of her long life (which Harriet doesn’t cover), Tubman continued to work tirelessly for the welfare of African Americans, as well campaigning for women’s suffrage.
Kasi Lemmons’s much anticipated biographical film about this exceptional woman premiered at Toronto in September and was released in North America at the start of November. It’s faring well enough commercially[1] but the critical reception hasn’t been overwhelmingly positive. Owen Gleiberman in Variety, while praising the lead performance, describes the film as ‘more dutiful than inspired’; ‘dutiful’ is probably also the word for a proportion of the positive reviews for Harriet, whose subject matter will make it, in some eyes, irreproachable. In fact, the film is frustrating because its protagonist’s life was so heroic – and because Cynthia Erivo leaves no doubt that, given the chance, she could have gone further and deeper in her portrayal of Harriet Tubman.
This is Kasi Lemmons’s fifth cinema feature (the first I’ve seen), over a period of some twenty years. It’s hard to tell if the fundamental problem is the screenplay, by Gregory Allen Howard and Lemmons, or the direction. The film never gets close to finding a balance between staging perilous incident and exploring Harriet’s personality and beliefs. As a result, she speechifies in some unlikely situations, including a climactic gunpoint showdown with Gideon Brodess (Joe Alwyn), the son of her former owner. Lemmons jettisons depth of illustration for the sake of dynamic action sequences: there’s little sense, for example, of the physical arduousness of Harriet’s interstate journeys. She turns up in Philadelphia with fresh rescuees from Maryland as if she’d picked them up a few streets away. Lemmons ladles Terence Blanchard’s (melanc)holy score onto the soundtrack from start to finish.
A traumatic head injury sustained during childhood at the hands of a slave-master left Harriet a dual legacy of hypersomnia and visions; she interpreted the latter as messages from God, in whom she had a deep and abiding faith. The film-makers don’t seem too sure how to handle this, except in the form of clichés – as when Harriet fearlessly wades into a lake, realising this is the only way that she and the group she’s leading can move forward in their journey to freedom. She offers up a prayer as the lake waters rise above her shoulders. The waters immediately fall, encouraging the others to follow her into the water. Harriet’s nickname of ‘Moses’, during the series of rescues that she carried out, is apt enough in the sense of her leading others to the Promised Land. This Red Sea moment is merely corny.
Cynthia Erivo plays Harriet with a passion and an urgency that always feel authentic, and has a trenchantly straightforward quality. She also sings occasionally, and stirringly, during the main narrative (and, over the closing credits, the original song ‘Stand Up, which Erivo co-wrote). But the character is trapped not only in a system of slavery but also in a series of well-worn melodramatic crises – a husband (Zackary Momoh) whom Harriet adores but who turns out to be faithless (and bigamous) is just the start – that detract from her individuality. Since the script fails to develop the character even of the extraordinary heroine, it goes without saying that the supporting roles are underwritten. Two African-American actors in particular leave you eager for more. As the Philadelphia abolitionist William Still, Leslie Odom Jr (best known as one of the stars of the original Broadway production of Hamilton) has a well-groomed gravitas that once or twice verges on comical pomposity but doesn’t make Still any less noble. Henry Hunter Hall is engagingly eccentric as the dodgy young man employed by the Brodess family as a slave-tracker but who becomes one of Harriet’s main helpers.
There’s a visiting-royalty smugness about Janelle Monáe’s interpretation of Marie Buchanon, a Philadelphia boarding-house proprietor who becomes Harriet’s friend. Although Monáe’s presence is mostly grating, there’s no denying it has also the effect of making more shocking Marie’s murder by two men brutally exploiting the provisions of the new Fugitive Slave Act[2]. Joe Alwyn does well again. Gideon Brodess was a sickly little boy for whose recovery the child Harriet prayed. Alwyn transmits that past into the adult Gideon whose viciousness is always fused with a sense of infirmity. Jennifer Nettles isn’t bad as his mother but the white cast’s roles are otherwise minor in terms of screen time, and the result is predictable. Most of the actors make the most of the little they’ve got by being hammily nasty and Kasi Lemmons is unable, or perhaps unwilling, to discourage this. The appalling normality of racialised abuse and violence in the society Lemmons describes is sacrificed in favour of villainous histrionics.
26 November 2019
[1] At the time of writing, Wikipedia is showing the worldwide box-office takings at $37.1m. The production budget was around $17m.
[2] This legislation is described on Wikipedia as ‘one of the most controversial elements of the 1850 compromise [between Southern slave-holding interests and Northern Free-Soilers] and heightened Northern fears of a “slave power conspiracy”. It required that all escaped slaves, upon capture, be returned to their masters and that officials and citizens of free states had to cooperate’.
