Given how much movie studios love biopics, American history, and slavery, it's flabbergasting that Harriet Tubman — not exactly an obscure figure in an untold chapter of this country's ugly history — has never been the primary subject of a theatrically released feature film.
Now Lemmons has returned with the long-overdue Harriet, whose subject had previously been consigned to early iterations of prestige television . Here Cynthia Erivo plays the woman who escaped slavery to Philadelphia, only to return and rescue others from bondage, working with the Underground Railroad. The movie follows her from young adulthood and leaves off before the start of the Civil War. Throughout, Harriet remains indefatigable.
Most disappointing, though, is how little Lemmons gets from her cast as a cohesive unit. Erivo has a couple of Oscar-ready won't-back-down speeches, and she performs them with vigor, but she spends most of the movie in a wide-eyed state of intensity, less immediately charismatic than she was in last year's Bad Times at the El Royale or, especially, Widows. Harriet is full of musical presence: Erivo is a talented singer, Leslie Odom Jr.
Yet the movie is content to leave out plenty of more concrete superheroics, revealing in its closing moments that Tubman became a Union spy, and one of the first U.S. women to lead soldiers into battle. Biographical films can't cover everything, of course, but the movie's postscript makes you wonder why the movie picked Gideon Brodess , a member of the family Tubman escaped from, to serve as a boilerplate villain when she could have been taking on the Confederates.
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