In Barry Jenkins’s reimagining of Colson Whitehead’s popular novel “The Underground Railroad,” it is as if the land speaks. In the light of high noon, cotton fields are menacingly fecund, owing to the work of the enslaved laborers who stand painfully erect among the crop, like stalks themselves. At night, a path leading somewhere—whether to freedom or execution, we don’t know—pulses with death. We have known Jenkins, the director of “Moonlight,” as a portraitist. Here, working again with his longtime collaborator, the cinematographer James Laxton, he is a virtuosic landscape artist. With “The Underground Railroad,” a compositional achievement—pictorial and psychological—Jenkins has done for the antebellum South what J. M. W. Turner did for the sea.
Amazon has curiously dropped all ten episodes of this dense miniseries at once. In the first two minutes, we are given the meat of Whitehead’s plot, which has been compressed into an Impressionistic montage, priming the audience for an intense experiment in durational storytelling. There is one recurring slow-motion sequence, of a young Black woman tumbling down a ladder into darkness. She is trailed by a flailing man, who, we later learn, is a slave-catcher—the obsessive Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton). The scene, which seems to reference the Old Testament story of Jacob’s ladder, puts us in a Biblical mood, and Jenkins’s vision, helped along by Nicholas Britell’s stunning score, is that of Exodus. The darkness is an entryway to a subterranean railroad: a network of trains used to transport enslaved people out of bondage. This metaphor made literal is the show’s framing conceit. The girl is Cora Randall (Thuso Mbedu, a revelation), who, along with the landscape, holds the soul of this historical fiction. She was born enslaved, on a Georgia plantation, and when we meet her she is being pressured by a confidant named Caesar (Aaron Pierre) to escape North. He tells Cora that he is “not supposed to be here.” Cora, who believes that her mother, Mabel (Sheila Atim), abandoned her as a child, in pursuit of freedom, scoffs ruefully. Jenkins lets the camera rest on their faces—a signature move, but here the shot is edged with something earthy rather than beatific.
Later in the episode, the plantation owner says, “A nigger and a man are two entirely different things.” Jenkins’s actors confront this paradox, which requires them to embody the idea of disembodiment. How do you play a person playing a body? What follows is a barrage of violence that, though spectacularly acted, makes for an arduous first hour. Particularly striking is Jenkins’s reinvention of the master-slave rape scene. Caesar and a woman are forced to procreate as the plantation owner watches—the master exerts his dominion not through his sex but through his awful, panoramic gaze. It’s a ritualistic act of war, in addition to the motor of the propagation of slavery. It also encapsulates the problem of American race cinema: violence by looking.
“The Underground Railroad” is a TV series, no doubt, but the history that Jenkins engages with, in addition to that of the country, is that of representational art. He excavates the imprint of slavery on older artistic traditions: painting, photography, novels, and, especially, cinema, which since its inception has been entangled with slavery and the dehumanization of the Black form. By the second episode of “The Underground Railroad,” which has some difficulty nailing its eerie tone, Cora and Caesar have fled the plantation, and we have had our first encounter with the surreal railroad and its conductors. An alternate-reality South Carolina provides a momentary reprieve for Cora and Caesar as notional freedmen, where they live under the aliases of Bessie and Christian. In this episode, the show enters the space of criticism: Cora works at a museum, where she and other women perform plantation reënactments—a kind of exhibitionist production that alludes to Henry (Box) Brown’s infamous travelling show, “Mirror of Slavery.” The ostensibly liberal whites of South Carolina, trapped in history that is not past, can process slavery only through the heavy filter of entertainment. It is a wretched Black boy, Homer (Chase Dillon, a genius child actor), Ridgeway’s assistant, who sees Cora for who she is, and therefore sees the “art” as fraudulent.
Fraudulence is the contemporary Black artist’s fear; authenticity, his constant bugbear. Everyone wants to know the artist’s motive, and everyone wants to catch him being false. Because Jenkins’s source is a fiction, he is relatively free to thread his personal taste through the effort. There are differences, some slight and some significant, between the novel and the series, but to enumerate them would be to validate a false hierarchy of the source text and its adaptation. (I think Jenkins’s treatment is superior, more adult.) “The Underground Railroad,” which is about not being seen as much as it is about being seen, engages with the chaos of the slavery epic by way of the rhythms of slow cinema. Hallucinations of memories interrupt the action. Ridgeway captures Cora from the secret cradle of an abolitionist in North Carolina and leads her to judgment, along the Trail of Tears. But she cannot submit to subjugation. She runs to the river and attempts suicide, which looks so much like baptism. Ridgeway pulls her out of the water. Jenkins does not leave the scene, capturing, from overhead, the hacking and groaning of these two characters, bonded by all matter of contract.
Jenkins is the confident artist who wears his influences on his sleeve. There are the painters—Julius Bloch, with his gaping lynching scenes, must have been on the director’s mind; Jasper, a runaway and a companion to Cora during her ordeal with Ridgeway, is a living, then dying, Kerry James Marshall figure—and the directors: Terrence Malick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Arthur Jafa. But the comparison to be anticipated is to “Roots.” (There is always an expectation that slave narratives will induce the healing that social institutions have neglected.) Steve McQueen and “12 Years a Slave” may also come up. The assertion of aesthetic choice and the use of dramatic filmmaking tend to provoke suspicion from people invested in the existence, or in the extermination, of the slave film. Educated audiences complain, after the release of one of these projects, that there is a truer reality of slavery to be exposed, one that is unmediated and unvarnished—as if the mediation and the varnish are not themselves a reveal. A good film cannot claim to understand slavery any better than a bad one, of which we have had many recently. (I am inclined to believe that the mediocre pieces “Antebellum” and “Them” are not craven or amoral but, rather, intolerably innocent, grotesquely honest.) At times, Jenkins’s direction is stunned by the violence of the subject matter. There is a moment, in the first episode, when the artist recedes and the camera blurs—a split second in which a man being burned alive is seen not from the outside but from within the eye of the man himself, his vision singed by heat.
The triumphs of “The Underground Railroad” are inextricable from its flaws. Jenkins’s series tries deeply to understand the character of Cora, who is always onscreen yet remains unknowable. We are most acquainted with her hunter, Ridgeway, who in the fourth episode is given a flashback treatment that is a masterly depiction of neurotic white masculinity. There is a question that seems unreasonable to ask, and yet I find myself asking it: What is freedom to Cora, who has not experienced it, and how will she know when she has found it? The series does not, and can not, envision the place beyond Exodus. The finale, beautiful as a fable but somewhat of an anticlimax, attempts an answer, one based in a kind of unsatisfying biological lore.
“The Underground Railroad” does stage arguments that explore the effects of caste, and of society’s other organizing fictions. Late in the series, it appears that Cora, brought by a chivalrous conductor called Royal (William Jackson Harper) to the free black village of Valentine Farm, has finally made it. And yet the freedmen stare at her, she says, like “a maggot on meat.” Her presence, and her gaze, disintegrates the picture they had created. ♦
