Harriet

It's a shame that Harriet Tubman isn't on our currency yet, but at least we have a new movie about her. Cynthia Erivo is great, and I also loved Janelle Monae's role as a free black woman in Philadelphia. Harriet's fainting spells coincide with seemingly prophetic visions, so she interprets this as God speaking to her and showing her the future. This conviction and strength help her to escape slavery and survive all her dangerous Underground Railroad trips.

I liked the movie a lot, though it puzzlingly focused a lot of time on Harriet's former owners the Brodesses. The son Gideon grew up with "Minty" as she was called then, and he makes racist analogies about slaves as pigs. Even after Minty escapes to the North and renames herself Harriet, we often see glimpses of the Brodess family struggling financially and trying to keep their other slaves from escaping. The movie builds up to a personal confrontation between Harriet and Gideon, and the plot revolves around it so much that when this climax finally happens, it seems to create an early, false ending. The rest of the movie spends too little time on the Combahee river raid, then Harriet rejoining her family after the war. I wish this had been a biopic that covered more of her life post-Civil War so we could see the complete picture.