From Portside Culture <[email protected]>
Subject The Stunning Achievement of Kasi Lemmons’s “Harriet”
Date November 13, 2019 1:00 AM
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["It’s a freedom movie; it’s not a slavery movie. It exists in
a very perilous and conflicted time in our country, but it’s really
about freedom and what you’re willing to do for it—not just for
you, but for others." - Kasi Lemmons] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE STUNNING ACHIEVEMENT OF KASI LEMMONS’S “HARRIET”  
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Richard Brody
October 30, 2019
The New Yorker
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_ "It’s a freedom movie; it’s not a slavery movie. It exists in a
very perilous and conflicted time in our country, but it’s really
about freedom and what you’re willing to do for it—not just for
you, but for others." - Kasi Lemmons _

Kasi Lemmons’s “Harriet,” starring Cynthia Erivo and Zackary
Momoh, is a drama of a hero whose heroism depends crucially on that of
others., Photograph by Glen Wilson / Focus Features

 

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.

In the presence of the Brodesses, Rev. Green preached, to the enslaved
black people held on that farm, a sermon of obedience and fervent
service to their presumptive masters. He is, however, secretly a part
of the Underground Railroad, and hides escapees in his church, offers
counsel for their northward escape, and recommends them to trusted
associates along the way. There’s a wonderful scene in which Minty
visits her father (Clarke Peters), also a freeman, by night, to tell
him of her plan to escape; he refuses to look at her (it’s not the
last time that this will happen) so that, if interrogated by whites,
he can truthfully deny that he had seen her. He also confers Minty to
the counsel of the preacher, whose public exhortations to meek
servility mask his daring activities.

Minty’s escape is harrowingly dramatic. Though it proved successful,
the grievous dangers and high risks that she confronts shadow her
successes with the menace of tragedy and reveal her efforts as a blend
of purpose and chance—of a desperate fatalism that’s redeemed only
by a confidence that’s bolstered both by an absolute sense of the
justice of her effort as well as by her invocation of her own
prophetic power. She uses that power openly, as a sort of deadly
weapon against Brodess, as he and his posse pursue her. Once she gets
out of Maryland and into Delaware, her flight involves the help of
white sympathizers, ones who work with the Underground Railroad and
even ones who don’t. Among the activists, one helps her get across
the border to Pennsylvania (a Northern state, where slavery was
barred) and advises her to head to Philadelphia and contact William
Still (Leslie Odom, Jr.), of the Anti-Slavery Society.

Still, a black man, is both an activist and a historian. He asks Minty
about her story; he keeps a volume of the stories of every escaped
slave he encounters. (Still’s actual historical records have been
published
[[link removed]].) He asks
whether she wants to take a new name (she takes Harriet, her
mother’s first name, and Tubman, her husband’s family name); he
elicits the story of the brutal beating by a master that put her in a
coma for two months and left her, she says, with her power of
prophetic vision. (The solemn account gives rise to a moment of humor:
Still records her story with the added note: Possible brain damage.)

Harriet’s freedom, of course, is only the beginning. She intends to
return to Maryland and help John and her other family members escape,
and she does so in defiance of Still, who fears both for her safety
and for the Railroad’s network, which would be jeopardized if she
were to be captured. Crucially, the owner of the rooming house where
she lives, Marie Buchanon (Janelle Monáe), prepares her for the
journey—and for the series of journeys that she’ll undertake to
help free others—by giving her a gun. In the course of her return
trips to Bucktown, and despite her efforts to bring members of her
family to freedom in the North, she endures agonizing separations. Yet
her trips, which she undertakes disguised as a man, are crowned with
success, and she becomes—anonymously—a subject of local myth and
obsession among the white population, who hope to catch and punish
“Moses the slave stealer,” the unknown person who has been
depleting their properties’ population of slaves.

In “Harriet,” Lemmons examines the practice of slavery—including
the financial and social interests of white enslavers. She dramatizes
the role of paid black trackers (played by Omar J. Dorsey and Henry
Hunter Hall) in slave owners’ efforts to capture escapees. She
depicts, in a series of interactions of an appalling violence, the
vast price paid by black people for the slightest display of
independent action; her vision of a society of unchallenged and
unquestioned white supremacy is terrifyingly totalitarian—including
in the compromises for mere survival that it imposes on those who are
its victims. A crucial turn in the drama is the passage, in 1850, of
the Fugitive Slave Act, meant to placate the South, that unleashed a
virtual army of bounty hunters in Northern cities and forced Tubman,
Still, and other Railroad activists to leave Philadelphia and head
farther North. Harriet moves to Canada, then joins Still at a meeting
in Auburn, New York, with one of the state’s senators, William
Seward, where, in a passionate speech, she rousingly reminds the
gathered dignitaries of the physical and moral horrors of slavery and
declares her intention of continuing her missions regardless of the
dangers they entail.

At that gathering, Still far-sightedly notes that, ultimately, only a
civil war would abolish slavery. Likened by many Maryland whites to
Moses, Harriet is also compared, by the Brodess matriarch, Eliza
(Jennifer Nettles), to Joan of Arc, and the martial metaphor is proved
in action. Harriet doesn’t shrink from using the gun that Marie has
provided. (There’s a notable moment when Harriet fords a river and
holds the weapon high above her head to keep the powder dry.) What’s
more, she envisions the Civil War and warns Gideon of the ruin and
death that he will endure in the name of the “vice and vicious
idea,” for “the sin of slavery”—and when her vision of war is
realized, she’s at its forefront, training a regiment of black
soldiers in the Union Army and leading them in a raid at the Combahee
River, in South Carolina, that frees seven hundred and fifty people
from slavery. It’s a raid that Harriet heralds, to those who would
soon be freed, by raising her voice in song.

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.

_RICHARD BRODY_ _began writing for The New Yorker in 1999. He writes
about movies in his blog, The Front Row
[[link removed]]. He is the author
of “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard
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