Kasi Lemmons
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Unlike the grisly “Braveheart” showdowns of “The Birth of a Nation,” Lemmons focuses on Tubman’s ability to take action and inspire others to do the same.
Despite some fleeting moving moments from the supporting cast, including Janelle Monae and Clarke Peters, Lemmons’ film suffers from a lack of inspired segues (montages featuring Leslie Odom Jr. as William Still provide easy, arguably awkward moments of catharsis) and underwhelming technical contributions, with two-time Oscar-winning DP John Toll ( Braveheart ; The Thin Red Line ) and composer Terence Blanchard (a regular Spike Lee contributor, Oscar nominated for his BlacKkKlansman score) driving sincerity into the realm of saccharine artifice.
The film is beautifully shot by multi-Oscar winner John Toll (Legends of the Fall, Braveheart), although every gorgeous sunset or sub-dappled field of grass is balanced with a frigid forest at midnight filled with terrified frozen breath or a raging river that Harriet must hurl herself into to escape.
But Harriet would, at least, have felt more at home if it had been released in the Nineties, when Gregory Allen Howard wrote the first version of the film’s script – a time when historical biopics (such as Braveheart ) were expected to be both epic and a little overcooked.
That’s not to diminish the contributions of cinematographer John Toll (“Braveheart”) and composer Terence Blanchard (“BlacKkKlansman”), but it’s important that the lead singular vision come from a rooted place of authenticity.
This isn’t the snarling, mustache-twirling villainy of Leonardo DiCaprio in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained .
Unlike the cartoonish revenge of “Django Unchained,” or the melancholic poetry of “12 Years a Slave,” Lemmons’ straightforward narrative style foregrounds its purpose — to translate Tubman’s heroism into cinematic terms — and the emotional coda pulls it off.
The value of “Harriet” may be clearer to critics when juxtaposed with other modern movies that cover the same atrocities: “Django Unchained” from 2012, Quentin Tarantino’s violent homage to spaghetti Westerns that includes slaves; the incendiary but historically accurate “12 Years a Slave” in 2013; and 2016’s cogent (though controversy-mired) “The Birth of a Nation,” based on Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831.
The film is beautifully shot by multi-Oscar winner John Toll (Legends of the Fall, Braveheart), although every gorgeous sunset or sub-dappled field of grass is balanced with a frigid forest at midnight filled with terrified frozen breath or a raging river that Harriet must hurl herself into to escape.
Cinematographer John Toll ( Legends of the Fall , The Thin Red Line ) has already created a handsome-looking film.
Both films focus on the horrors of slavery, which has been characterized as America’s “Original Sin,” but there’s an important difference.
Michael and Danny Philippou’s “Talk to Me” contains splendid nasty scares, often feeling like Australia’s answer to Sam Raimi’s “The Evil Dead” (or Joel Schumacher’s “Flatliners”) for the modern generation, where teens summon ghostly spirits as a party trick or newly found drug.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
Directed by David Fincher
influenced by Talk to Me (2007)
Even if the industry still hasn’t recognized Henson for her “Hustle & Flow” performance, her 18 episodes of “Boston Legal” from 2007 to 2008 as Whitney Rome or her role in 2007’s “Talk to Me” with Don Cheadle, Henson says after this press tour and upon release of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” “you will surely know me now” and know how to pronounce her Swahili name, too.
Director Rick Famuyiwa (Brown Sugar, Talk to Me) serves up another self-reflexive study of race relations, romance and pop culture with Dope.
Credit is due to writer/director Rick Famuyiwa (who shared an NAACP Image award with Michael Genet for their Talk to Me script) for going against the grain with this comedic tale of three friends from a tough LA neighbourhood whose unfashionable interests include filling in college applications, playing in a punky guitar band and listening to shiny 90s beats or, as the film puts it, “shit white people like”.
The film was written and directed by Rick Famuyiwa, who also made “Brown Sugar” and “Talk to Me.” Since, like the protagonist, Famuyiwa is a native of Inglewood, Calif., and had a Nigerian father, I’m guessing it’s at least semi-autobiographical.
Famuyiwa has been around a while and his best work, such as the screenplay for the Don Cheadle vehicle "Talk to Me," indicates a voice deserving of wider recognition.