Spoilers for the first episode ahead.
"The Underground Railroad" is Barry Jenkins' first major project since "If Beale Street Could Talk," and it's a big one. Based on the novel by Colson Whitehead, this is a ten hour miniseries about an alternate universe version of the antebellum South, where the Underground Railroad is in operation. However, this Underground Railroad has real trains and railroad tracks, as well as conductors, engineers, and stations. Make no mistake, however, that these fanciful notions don't mean that we're going to see a portrayal of life in the slave states that is any less brutal or distressing than it was in reality. The first episode alone features brutal whippings and a runaway slave is executed via immolation.
The series is set up as an anthology of sorts, following the major characters as they travel from state to state, and dangerous situation to dangerous situation, with occasional digressions and flashbacks. Our heroine is a young woman named Cora Randall (Thuso Mbedu), a plantation slave who flees Georgia with another slave, Caesar (Aaron Pierre). They're pursued by a stubborn slave catcher, Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton), and his assistant Homer (Chase W. Dillon), a small black boy. As Cora travels through the country in search of freedom, she meets many more characters, including those played by Mychal-Bella Bowman, Lily Rabe, Marcus "MJ" Gladney Jr., Sam Poulter, William Jackson Harper, Amber Gray, and Chukwudi Iwuji. Peter Mullan and Sheila Atim play Rideway's father and Cora's mother in flashbacks.
Like Jenkins' other work so far, "The Underground Railroad" is a character drama through and through, very moody and internal. It took a lot of patience for me to get through some of the episodes, because the pace is often so slow and contemplative. There's a wonderful sense of place and time achieved by the production, and the cinematography is absolutely gorgeous throughout. I found myself appreciating the careful construction of the period houses and cabins, everything inside them, the beautifully framed shots of nature, and the subtly heightened instances of magical realism. I love the inclusion of these little moments out of time, where the narrative will sometimes pause to let the camera sweep over a tableaux of figures in slow motion. However, I had to turn the closed captions on to decipher much of the heavily accented and low volume dialogue.
As good as the show is, and as strong as many of the performances are - Joel Edgerton in particular is a treat - "The Underground Railroad" is the kind of angry cri de coeur against the white patriarchy and the lie of American Exceptionalism that requires way too much endurance to be approachable for most viewers. The miserabilism of the African-American struggle is so draining to watch, and our heroes are traumatized and disillusioned over and over again to the point where it's numbing. The whole series often feels like an exceptionally well shot horror film playing out in frustrating slow motion. I think some of this could have been balanced out with a stronger lead, but Cora is awfully subdued or shell-shocked for an awful lot of her screen time. Not that I blame her, considering the circumstances.
Then again, I watched the whole series over the course of three days, and that was probably not the intended method of consumption, even though it was released on Amazon Prime all at once. Some of the episodes really need time to digest and absorb. This is a show that I am very glad exists because of how well it's executed, and because it's tackling familiar subject matter in a novel way. Jenkins uses the variable episode length especially well, with some episodes essentially functioning like individual films. However, it's also an intense emotional ordeal on the level of watching something like "Shoah" or "Come and See," and I wasn't remotely prepared for that. With that in mind, if the trip sounds like it's for you, it's worth taking.
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