In the recent debate about Martin Scorsese's disparaging comments about Marvel movies, I tended to agree with his opinion that those movies aren't really cinema. In his comments, he compared them to theme parks, which I think is reasonable. But the seemingly endless stream of superhero movies aren't the only kind of movies in modern Hollywood that are problematic; there's also what are often referred to as Oscar bait films. Now, while I think the Oscar season (which comes around the last three months of the year) is really the only time when you can see movies made for mature audiences in big multiplexes, the inevitable result can be movies a little too determined to win awards.
An Oscar bait film in one that seems so calculated to please middle brow audiences, with a serious subject matter and plenty of obvious, heavy handed, uplifting moments, that it becomes smug, self satisfied cinema. Since winning an Oscar can translate to millions of more dollars at the box office, Oscar bait films seem to be actually marketing themselves to the Academy while you're watching them.
The perfect example of such a film was 2017's THE ZOOKEEPER'S WIFE. From its historical setting (it's a holocaust drama) to it's too pretty cinematography, to its high minded speeches and brave, noble heroine (the titular character hides Jewish refugees from the Nazis), it's a movie that practically screams "love me!" at the audience, as it brazenly apes the far superior SHINDLER'S LIST. While disliking such a film is like kicking a puppy, its cloying nature is overwhelming. It also functions as an example of how Oscar bait can suffer from overreach; despite its obvious ambitions for award glory, the film was mostly critically panned and garnered zero awards.
I bring up the subject of an Oscar bait movie because I just saw the Kasi Lemmon film HARRIET, and it practically drips with such Award desiring fervor. Unfortunately, it's just not that good of a film. I say that as an admirer of Lemmon, who's past films like EVE'S BAYOU (1997) and the sadly underrated TALK TO ME (2007) are really good. But with HARRIET she mostly stumbles.
The film's biggest flaw is that the character of Harriet Tubman in Lemmon's direction, script (which she co wrote with Gregory Allen Howard) and Cynthia Erivo's performance never feels like a real person. Instead, she functions as a symbol of nobility and bravery to such a degree she never comes across as relatable. There is one brief moment in the opening scene in which she cries a single tear; after that she all stoic determination. She is constantly making big speeches about freedom, and refusing to listen to the men around her who tell her what she can and cannot do. She never makes a wrong move and seems superhuman in her ability to lead slaves to freedom. The result is that we admire her without really feeling for her as anything more than an important historical figure. It doesn't help that the real dizzy spells that Tubman suffered from are translated here to actual visions that she uses to avoid capture. Like I said, super human.
It should be mentioned this is often a problem with biopics, with writers and directors so determined to show their subjects in a positive light that they become blathering depictions of perfect people: from Gary Cooper's god like Lou Gehrig in THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES way back in 1942 to Russell Crowe's noble James Braddock in 2005's CINDERELLA MAN, biopics too often just go too far in giving us someone to root for. It would appear that Lemmon was intimidated by being the first director to ever bring to the screen such an important figure in African American history as Tubman, so she overcompensated on the character's bravery and lost her humanity. I wish she had taken a page from the far superior 2014 film SELMA, in which director Ava DuVernay was able to show Martin Luther King Jr with complexity, displaying his flaws alongside his strengths.
It also doesn't help that Lemmon fills the movie with action cliches, as Tubman makes one narrow escape after another; while I'm sure the real Tubman's life was filled with danger, I can't quite believe that she came so close to losing her life so often. Also, Lemmon clearly made this film with a young audience in mind, imagining American history teachers encouraging their students to see the film. And while this may not seem to be a bad thing, it also means that the film's PG-13 rating limits its ability to accurately display the horrors of slavery. 2013's 12 YEARS A SLAVE, with its far more brutal and realistic depiction of slave life works much better than Harriet's almost sanitized view in my opinion.
So, will Oscar go for the bait of HARRIET? I suppose it will, considering that it's important lead character is hard to pass over (Cynthia Erivo is a shoo in for a Best Actress nomination, partly because it's always a bit of a stretch to find five movies that feature women in lead roles to fill up that category). And I will say that I while I'm listing all of its flaws, I don't consider it to be a lousy movie, or even a bad one. I just wish that Lemmon weren't shooting for both Oscar glory and a mainstream audience, and instead had kept to making a more real film with more realistic characters and story. Tubman deserved better.
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