Traumatic, relentless and beautiful
BARRY Jenkins unpacks two legacies in The Underground Railroad. One is ugly and horrific, the resounding echo of an institution that stripped human beings of their culture and identity and enslaved them for profit. The other is beautiful and stirring, marked by resilience and resolve.
These legacies have been intertwined for the last 400 years, but few, if any, on-screen efforts have explored their uneasy convergence as intentionally and cohesively as Jenkins’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. The filmmaker brings Whitehead’s alternate history – anchored by a literal underground railroad that clandestinely transports runaway slaves – to vivid and visually stunning life.
The story follows Cora (Thuso Mbedu) as she and a protective fellow slave named Caesar (Aaron Pierre) escape from a Georgia plantation with a vindictive slave catcher on their heels. The railroad facilitates a grim tour of the American South, with each stop reinforcing – in its terrifying own way – the supremacist delusion at the heart of the nation’s darkest legacy.
Some viewers will understandably broach The Underground Railroad with trepidation: Jenkins presents the horrors of slavery in unflinching and relentless detail. I’ve seen Roots (the original and the 2016 remake), 12 Years a Slave, and the excellent but short-lived thriller, Underground, but nothing comes close to the brutal violence depicted in The Underground Railroad. I used the pause button a lot – both to collect and to brace myself.
Cora and Caesar slip away from the Randall plantation following a barbaric show of violence against another enslaved person who dared to run. Cora experiences loss after loss as she attempts to make her way to freedom, and her grief is compounded by the loss of her mother, Mabel (Sheila Atim), who escaped from the plantation when Cora was a child.
The trauma of slavery runs like a current through the series, but pain is not the totality of Cora’s story – even in her darkest moments. The show is singular in the way it depicts the strength and perseverance of black people, who have endured generations of abuse in a country built on paradoxical notions of freedom.
With the help of a free man named Royal (William Jackson Harper), Cora eventually lands in Indiana, where she becomes part of a thriving black community. But there is tension here, too, between some of the formerly enslaved black people who founded the farm community and Cora, who is considered a fugitive in the eyes of the law. The debate spawns duelling sermons from two of the founders about the future of black people in America.
Like its source material, The Underground Railroad is punctuated with surreal elements – namely the train that gives Cora hope. Composer Nicholas Britell’s haunting and, at turns, whimsical score brilliantly incorporates the urgent and foreboding horn of a locomotive. But the series is most chilling in its exploration of the very real violence and cruelty that defined the era for African-Americans (and, more subtly, the ways it reverberates today).
Even after she finds refuge out West, Cora still fears Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton), the slave catcher intent on finding her. He’s a prominent character but, rest assured, there are no white saviours here. The Underground Railroad explores the insecurities and personal failures that led Ridgeway to his bloodthirsty profession, but it does not make excuses for his viciousness.
As recently reported by the
New York Times, Jenkins briefly considered abandoning The Underground Railroad, a project that was met with some scepticism and the recurring question of whether Hollywood needs more stories about slavery. The director told the paper he decided to move forward after Amazon commissioned a focus group that asked black Atlanta residents if Whitehead’s novel should be adapted for the screen. According to Jenkins, a mere 10% of respondents said that it shouldn’t.
“The other 90% were like, ‘Tell it, but you have to show everything. It needs to be hard. It needs to be brutal,’ ” Jenkins said.
It certainly is. Throughout the week I spent watching The Underground Railroad, I found myself drawn to the amateur genealogical research I’ve done on my own family, which is descended in part from African-American slaves. One by-product of slavery’s cruel design is that records for these ancestors are hard to come by.
Still, some of my relatives’ stories have made their way to me: the great-great-great grandmother who found her way back to her family in Virginia, years after being sold to a plantation owner in Mississippi; the male relatives in her line who defiantly changed their surnames so their children wouldn’t bear the name of a man who owned people for profit.
In some ways, this made The Underground Railroad all the more difficult to watch. Pain is abundant, and the series beckons us to grieve. Take your time, but don’t look away. There’s much more to Cora’s story.