A movie starring Cynthia Erivo — and co-starring Leslie Odom Jr. and Janelle Monae — cries out to be a musical. But “Harriet,” in which Erivo plays American icon Harriet Tubman, dispenses with interpretive flourishes or showy set pieces simply to tell its story straight and true.
That story is of a young woman who was born into slavery and who, in the mid-19th century, dared to escape her owners’ Eastern Shore plantation, travel more than 100 miles on foot to Philadelphia, then dedicate her life to leading more enslaved people to freedom, eventually becoming a leader in the abolitionist and suffrage movements.
The image most of us have of Tubman is of the noble older woman wearing a headscarf and somewhat inscrutable expression. With “Harriet,” she is rescued from that image to become a vital, fearless, spiritually driven hero whose physical bravery is only equaled by her moral courage. Struck on the head as an adolescent, Tubman was subject, throughout her life, to visions that she attributed to God speaking to and through her. Here, she emerges not just as a dynamic leader — the Moses that so many called her — but as someone in tune with higher forces impelling her to fulfill a mission she might not always fully understand.
Co-written and directed by Kasi Lemmons, “Harriet” begins in 1849, when Tubman — born Araminta “Minty” Ross — is still living in Dorchester County. Although legally she and her siblings were supposed to be freed, her owners are keeping her as a veritable prisoner, underlining how slavery was a system, not just of free labor, but of kidnapping, theft, fraud and torture.