HARRIET

HARRIET is worth seeing for Cynthia Eriva's performance in the title role. She pulls off the transformations of aging and experience so well, she deserves the awards Renee Zellweger has been getting for Best Actress in a movie in 2019. In fact, Eriva's performance holds the movie together singlehandedly, despite some challengingly contrived fictional scenes that the real drama of Harriet Tubman's life and accomplishments didn't need.

Thankfully there's a lot of good acting in this film, besides Eriva's, and some powerfully emotional and dramatically tense scenes that do express the reality of this icon's accomplishments. And I'm grateful it was made even with its flaws. Maybe it will move people to ask what's holding up the transformation of the twenty dollar bill from the present one with the image of Andrew Jackson, the man responsible for The Trail of Tears and other atrocities, to the new one with the image of Harriet Tubman, savior of slaves who outwitted and helped defeat the purveyors of one of humankind's worst evils.