Colson Whitehead’s prize-winning novel becomes an expansive miniseries.
The last thing you want in a TV show portraying slavery is phony sensitivity.
Don’t let that all-encompassing historical monstrosity off the hook with a chilly, inoffensive lecture.
Thuso Mbedu on ‘The Underground Railroad’.Credit: Kyle Kaplan/Amazon Studios
So credit directorBarry Jenkinsfor turning upThe Underground Railroad’s heat.
In a terrifying 19th century located halfway between myth and your newsfeed, the whip cracks sound like gunshots.
Magic-hour light shines so bright on enslaved men and women that their bodies are outlined with halos.
There are flashbacks, flash-forwards, and a font so huge that “Georgia” splits across two lines.
Outkast, the Pharcyde, andMichael Jacksonplay over end credits.
The anachronism is light, but telling: A white man references FUBU more than a century early.
Her plantation is the hell-world setting for the first chapter, which depicts atmospheric violence with bloody authenticity.
Jenkins draws you into the circumscribed life on the plantation, filming the surrounding nature with a tormenting beauty.
The trees are part of the cage.
And a white man’s arrival is an occasion of elemental horror, silencing all conversation and music.
Yet there are notes of trippy satire.
The Southern gentry are sociopathic dandies, enjoying a courtly dance while they burn a screaming man to death.
Cora’s fellow captive Caesar (Aaron Pierre) plans an escape.
Their journey leads into a quest through various ruinations of Black life.
That glossy refuge has a paranoid underbelly, with an eerie medical twist.
Other characters beyond Cora and Caesar step into the spotlight.
Whitehead’s novelwas a phenomenon, and Jenkins is fresh off Oscar seasons forMoonlightandIf Beale Street Could Talk.
So there’s a no-expense-spared quality toRailroad’s epic sweep.
Mbedu brings power and pain to a part that requires endless hours of fear.
Jenkins excels at a dreamy state of intimacy, but the allegorical setting can turn distancing.
Here, vivid characters keep getting trapped in abstract themespace.
And the 320-page book has become a semi-shapeless streamer, with most episodes clocking over an hour.
I like Edgerton, but the character calls for more internal chaos than his trademark perturbation allows.
The instinct is magnification, a zeroing-in on key plot moments and characters.
