People escape the underground railroad3/31/2023 ![]() Another episode flashes back to Mabel’s life of quiet resistance. Jenkins builds out Ridgeway’s story in an episode about his conflict with his idealistic father. Dillon), the dapper, chillingly composed Black boy who assists him. He’s as prolix as she is reserved, holding forth on Manifest Destiny to Homer (Chase W. Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton), a bounty hunter whose failure to capture Cora’s mother still obsesses him, carries much of the story as he pursues Cora. Structurally, the series follows Whitehead’s design, with some expansions. (On Vimeo, Jenkins released a collection of the tableaux he shot, most of them not used in the series, as the 50-minute video “The Gaze.”) In between scenes, he stages still portraits - sometimes individually, sometimes en masse - as if to restore them the individuality and humanity that slavery meant to strip them of. Likewise, Jenkins’s artistry keeps his characters from becoming merely the sum of their pain. This is a beautiful work that pretties nothing up. Like Whitehead’s novel, the series is fabulistic yet grittily real. The world he depicts is terrible, in every dictionary sense - both horrifying and awe-striking. ![]() It’s as if he has figured out how to funnel more feeling through a camera lens than anyone else. ![]() Cora’s journey is one of contrasts: the breath of freedom, the terror of pursuit, the teasing possibility of safety, the reminders, everywhere, of a system of bloodthirsty cruelty. On top of this cascade of sights is the most arresting TV soundscape since at least “Twin Peaks: The Return.” The audio makes this world tactile: the rasp of cicadas haunting the woods, the echoes and howling of air in subterranean tunnels, the clanking of keys and scraping of metal that impart just how heavy shackles and manacles are.Īll this is more than technical wizardry the aesthetics are inseparable from the story. (The last setting is the series’s most idyllic, and thus its most heartbreaking.) Cora’s journey into an alternative antebellum America takes her to South Carolina, where a paternalistic regime of uplifting Black people hides sinister intentions North Carolina, of the horrific Freedom Trail, where Black people are banned entirely, on pain of death Tennessee, smoldering from a biblical litany of disasters and Indiana, where free Black families nurture a tenuous prosperity. That face proves to be multiple and monstrous. “Just look outside as you speed through,” a railway worker tells them, “and you’ll see the true face of America.” It’s a rough-hewed network that honeycombs the country, its stations ranging from grotty caverns to palatial terminals. But in a magic-realist twist, this underground railroad is no metaphor. One escapee is flayed and burned to death on the lawn while the owner and his guests enjoy a sunlit banquet and dancing - a vision of hell as entertainment in someone else’s heaven.Īs in several recent stories - the movie “Harriet,” the series “Underground” - an abolitionist network abets Cora and Caesar’s escape. At heart, it’s an escape story Cora and her friend Caesar (Aaron Pierre) flee a Georgia cotton plantation whose owner has a taste for grotesque punishments. Jenkins’s series sets its terms in the first episode. You will see a stirring, full-feeling, technically and artistically and morally potent work, a visual tour de force worthy of Whitehead’s imaginative one. But you will also see humanity and resistance and love. If you choose to watch “The Underground Railroad,” whose roughly 10 hours arrive Friday on Amazon Prime Video, yes, you will see atrocities. Who does need to see this? Who can bear to? Jenkins (“Moonlight”) has said that this sort of question gave him pause in deciding whether to make the series.īut make it he did. But it recalls a recurring issue raised by other depictions of violent oppression, from the racial horror stories of “Lovecraft Country” and “Them” to the endless replaying of George Floyd’s murder. In the novel, the line is, “I wanted you to see this.” It’s a tiny change, and I don’t know how intentional it is. Along the road they’re traveling, grimly called “The Freedom Trail,” the trees are hung with lynched corpses. In Barry Jenkins’s transfixing adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad,” Martin (Damon Herriman), a white man smuggling Cora (Thuso Mbedu) as she escapes slavery, rouses her before dawn to witness something ghastly.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |