‘Harriet’ does justice to story of Tubman’s life

MOVIE REVIEW

“HARRIET”

Rated PG-13. At  AMC Loews Boston Common, Coolidge Corner Theatre, Kendall Square Cinema and Regal Fenway Stadium.

Grade: B+

Like the 2013 Academy Award winner “12 Years a Slave,” Kasi Lemmons’ often moving “Harriet” tells a true and timely story derived from the history of slavery in America.

Based on the life of American icon, anti-slavery champion and Civil Rights-era heroine Harriet Tubman, featuring the London-born Tony Award-winner Cynthia Erivo (“The Color Purple”) in the title tole, the story begins in Maryland in 1849 when Harriet’s family of slaves is separated by its white owner. Some time later, Tubman and her husband John (Zackary Momoh) ask Tubman’s owner to let their children be born free and are refused. The local Rev. Samuel Greene (a standout Vondie Curtis-Hall, Lemmons’ husband), performs a “God-loves-slaves” Sunday service, complete with cherry-picked lines from the Bible, for the plantation owner’s family and its human property. He and Tubman’s artistic father, Ben Ross (a memorable as usual Clarke Peters), later help Tubman, whose slave name is Minty, on her way north. She eventually escapes, traveling 100 miles alone and on foot, to Philadelphia.

There, she takes the “free” name Harriet. Proud of her accomplishment and convinced like Joan of Arc that she is guided by heavenly voices, Harriet meets abolitionist William Still (a fine and funny Leslie Odom Jr.), chairman of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society and a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Risking capture, torture, being hobbled and perhaps even death at the stake, Harriet, whose scars include a “dent in the head” from a blow, returns to Maryland to rescue the rest of her family.

“Harriet,” which reminds us of the origin of the expression “sold down the river,” is the story of a young slave woman, who earns the biblical nickname “Moses” for leading her people to freedom, if not out of Egypt. Harriet’s nemesis is a political system that not only allowed slavery as an institution to stand but made it more dangerous for her after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, declaring that all escaped slaves had to be returned to their owners.

The slave-owning family in “Harriet” is headed by the ruthless, dogged and sneering Gideon Brodess (baby-faced Brit Joe Alwyn, standing in for Michael Fassbender’s Edwin Epps). Gideon and Harriet grew up together on the Brodess family’s Maryland plantation. He semi-fondly remembers her watching over him while he was bedridden with an illness as a boy. Also in the strong supporting cast are Janelle Monae as the free-born Philadelphia boarding house owner Marie, Vanessa Bell Calloway as Harriet’s mother and star-in-the-making Henry Hunter Hall as a young gun-toting slavewho helps capture escaped slaves but has a change of heart.

“Harriet” is both an anti-slavery tale and a portrait of a feminist awakening. Harriet’s experiences teach her she does not need an owner — or a husband for that matter. In the title role, Erivo holds everything together, even when the screenplay by Gregory Allen Howard (“Remember the Titans”) and Lemmons (“Black Nativity”) gets a bit too “Django Unchained” for its own good. A postscript reminds us that Harriet Tubman was an armed scout and spy for the Union Army during the Civil War. See “Harriet” and wonder why this heroic figure isn’t on the $20 bill instead of Andrew Jackson.

(“Harriet” contains violence, cruelty and racist language.)

 

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2C6Lyzz