ALL ABOARD THE FREEDOM TRAIN
Tymon Smith reviews Barry Jenkins’s epic new series on antebellum slavery in the US
Director Barry Jenkins’s 10-episode adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Underground Railroad is a wonderfully evocative and provocative beast that twists and turns its way through the brutal history of antebellum slavery in the US with a sharp eye for how this terrible chapter in America’s past laid the foundation for its future.
It’s not so much a series as an epic film and Jenkins, with his longtime collaborators cinematographer James Laxton and composer Nicholas Brittle, and shining South African lead actress Thuso Mbedu, weaves a complicated, multilayered portrait of a world that, while inspired by the horrendous realities of slavery and the groundwork laid out in Whitehead’s novel, is ultimately an entirely original piece of art in its own right.
The story follows the journey of Cora (Mbedu), a young woman born and raised in bondage on a Georgia plantation. Her brutal reality is made bearable through the belief in a foundational legend: she will escape the plantation and be reunited with her mother, Mabel, who’d left her behind when she escaped some years before. After persuasion from fellow slave Caesar (Aaron Pierre), Cora agrees to make a break for freedom, travelling on the mythical underground railroad, which here, as in the novel, is depicted literally as an actual railroad complete with trains that run under the ground, helping slaves to leave the South for more liberal destinations across the country.
What Cora discovers is a collection of different attitudes towards slavery as well as a few moments in which she can briefly taste freedom and breathe without choking in what one of the railroad’s engineers tells her is the “real America”, beyond the confines of the plantation life. But moments of respite are few and short because of the dogged and ruthless slave catcher Ridgeway, who’s always hot on Cora’s heels.
Each episode offers a window into a different world — some kind and accepting, others even harsher than Georgia. Each is indelibly shaped by their relationship to slavery and the long shadow it casts across the land. Jenkins uses Whitehead’s novel not as a map to be fastidiously followed but rather as an inspiration from which he can make his own, unique and thoughtful way, expanding brief moments and lesser characters in the book into fully fledged episodes and back stories within his cinematic vision, informed by a determination to redress centuries of indifference to the representation of black Americans in the visual arts and popular culture.
Cora’s journey is biblical and classical, harking back to Exodus and The Odyssey. There’s also an injection of urgency and relevance that makes Jenkins’ realisation of the story an unapologetic product of the present moment. In a two-episode chapter set against the scorched earth of a hellish Tennessee, the show offers a vision of torment and anguish that’s straight out of Dante before blacking out and dropping us into a deceptively Utopian vision of black self-determination on an idyllic Indian farm. That hopeful vision will soon be torn asunder by the inevitable intolerance of white landowners and Ridgeway’s brutal gatecrashing. But, for a moment. Jenkins offers an alternative vision of a world that might have existed.
Although desperation and anxiety drive the narrative and the setting up of the eventual confrontation between Cora and her nemesis Ridgeway, Jenkins keeps the story unfolding with a slow, carefully observed gaze. There are moments for the expression of the hopes, joys, dreams and fears of the characters who must live their lives in spite of the chaos of the cruel forces beyond their control and comprehension.
The Underground Railroad is a deeply humane and empathetic saga about the power of basic human needs, desires, hopes and determination to survive that keeps us driving forward in even the most impossibleto-overcome circumstances.