If you’re a filmmaker tasked with making a project about slavery ina post-12 Years A Slaveworld, justifying why you’re putting the audience through a reminder of this dark history is a must. To honestly portray the depths of America’s original sin, it requires a precarious balance of honesty about how horrific it truly is and a sense of tact in knowing how much brutality you should show responsibly, lest you run the risk of glorifying it.
It’s also one thing to make a relatively brief two-hour film about the subject, but to also consider developing a miniseries of 10 hour-long episodes to tell its story? Would it be too much for an audience to take? These were questionsAcademy Award-winning filmmakerBarry Jenkinshad to answer when developingThe Underground Railroad. He made it into a triumph of form and storytellingthat proves that you can tell a genuinely beautiful story out of such ugly material.
The Underground Railroad
A young woman named Cora makes an amazing discovery during her attempt to break free from slavery in the deep south.
In this adaptation ofColson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Cora (Thuso Mbedu) is a slave stuck in Georgia, who’s looking to escape after witnessing a runaway slave get burned alive in a show of public punishment. With the help of her only close ally, Caesar (Aaron Pierre),she sets out to find the Underground Railroad, the best path towards free parts of the United States. In real history, the Underground Railroad was an intricate system of routes and locations on an unofficially designated route throughout the country, gradually going to either “free” northern states or Canada. However,in this fictional version of history,the railroad is portrayed as a magical realist construction, a tangible railroad that trains run on and has fully functioning stations.
It’s through this system that Cora and Caesar run away from the forces that are trying to capture them, personified by the veteran slave catcher Arnold Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton) and his young ward, Homer (Chase Dillon), both of whom are constantly nipping at their heels. This makes the show sound like it’sa blood-pumping thriller, with the constant pressure of being chased bearing down on its protagonists and adding a ticking clock element. While that is undoubtedly there, and you will never forget the haunting look in Cora’s eyes as she’s perpetually caked in sweat,Jenkins' instincts are to take the story at a more leisurely pace.The longform format of a miniseriesallows him the time to spend more time with various characters and enrich the tapestry of their inner lives.
From the opening shot of the first episode, it submerges you in the precarious yet beautiful tone that permeates throughout the series. Riffing on theconcept of in media res, we open with Cora and Arnold free-falling into a dark hole, shot in slow motion. This is then followed by a montage of important moments that we’ll see later in the show, like Cora’s birth, the railroad itself, and eventual allies in different stages of distress. This is capped off by Cora standing near a river, slowly turning with a sorrowful gaze, inviting us to learn about her story. It’s a moment presented outside the flow of the story, and provides a context for how to approach the miniseries. While the idea ofan alternate history involving a mystical railroad could be too fantastic, framing what’s presented as potentially Cora’ssubjectively interpreted memory of how it happenedmakes it an easier pill to swallow.This allows the series to adapt its flow episodically, and it makes the story a better fit for Jenkins' approach to filmmaking.
Despite having only three feature films to his name (andan upcomingLion Kingprequel in production), Barry Jenkinshas already made himself a true auteur with a distinct style. Thanks to his longstanding collaboration with cinematographerJames Laxton, he’s created a visual language that enhances the beauty that can be found in everyday life without forcing his various worlds into one uniform vision. From the desaturated faux black-and-white ofMedicine For Melancholyto the mixture of bracing handheld and slow motion portraits inMoonlight,Jenkins’eyes see a worldthat’s tied down by the harsh, surrounding environment, yet filtered with the protagonists' drive to treasure the things that give them hope.
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‘Euphoria’s Sam Levinson had also been developing a new take on the series.
Evoking both thesporadic jittery joys ofWong Kar-Waiand the fourth-wall breaking empathy cannon close-ups ofJonathan Demme, Jenkins strives to be unflinchingly devoted to the integrity of the characters’ experiences, while remaining honest about how hard they are to endure.To cherish the light isn’t to ignore the dark, andThe Underground Railroadis the best example of this seemingly paradoxical dynamic, as it’s an extremely harrowing concept to attempt to build a story based around the horrors of slavery with any level of honest attempts at creating moments of rapturous beauty throughout.
This dovetails nicely into one of the most impressive aspects of the show: it’s ability to be upfront about the depravity of the materialwithout being exploitative. This project came out at a time when there was an increased temperature to the dialogue around how to appropriately portray racial violence onscreen without being too traumatizing for audiences. Films likeDetroitandshows likeThemcaught a lot of flak for how they allegedly bombarded the audience with senseless images of violence against Black people for the sake of shallow social commentary, andThe Underground Railroadcame out when that discussion was at a fever pitch.When promoting the show,Barry Jenkins spoke about the lengths he wentto show the trauma while remaining respectful to both the audience and his fellow artists working on the project.As an example, he uses Laxton’s camera work combined with the editing processto make a distinction between violence for the sake of survival and violence fueled by hatred.Violence for survival is shown with as little relish as possible, presenting it as a necessary element of the fight for freedom. Violence because of racismis rarely, if ever, directly depicted onscreen, but we are always aware of its consequences.
Take the pilot, where we’re shown two different scenes of violence, with drastically different results. When Cora and Caesar witness a recently captured runaway slave being burned alive, the camera focuses on Cora and Caesar watching while it’s happening, butthen the camera gives half-focused glaresat the burning body. In a feat of perspective brilliance,the camera takes on the vision of the victim, with blurry eyes slowly blinking as they finally die.Comparatively, when Cora and Caesar are on the run and caught by slave catchers, Cora wrestles and kills her captor with a swift ax chop to the head.While we witness the violent act in full, there’s no relish to it,and we spend more time fixating on Cora’s reaction of horror and confusion at what she’s just done.Due to film being a visual medium, filmmakers often think violence will have no punch unless they bury the audiences' faces in it onscreen, but Jenkins shows thathow you treat violence can make it more powerful in unexpected ways. Whether elevated into the realm of visual poetry or ground down into the mud and the blood,it makes the important distinction between righteous violence and violence weaponized by evil just from camera position and time spent, which demonstrates Jenkins' level of visual sophistication.
A calling card of Barry Jenkins' films is the overflowing love he has for all of his characters,extending empathyand grace for everyone, and ensuring they’re all painted in detail. In Jenkins' hands, rather than falling into the “good Nazi” trap, where we’re shown one person who treats our protagonists like humans but still believes in the ideology (thereby not questioning the larger social structures at play), we’re shown the backstory of the antagonist Ridgeway. Ridgeway was raised by a father who hated slavery, employed freed slaves, and ran a blacksmith business that he wanted his son to take part in. Ridgeway knew he wasn’t suited for that field, and was jealous of the Black workers for their skill and strength, and was deeply self-conscious about this. This, combined with his father’s teachings about all things in life being divine, led Arnold to form a belief that if slaves made themselves free, it meant they were worthy of life, and those that weren’t free were unworthy of life. None of this is presented as an excuse, but rather an exploration of the hard truththat racism can come fromdeep-rooted psychological impulsesthat lead them down toxic roads that they choose not to come back from.
On the flip side, an entire episode of the show isdevoted to a side characternamed Fanny Briggs (Mychal-Bella Bowman). She was a slave in hiding at a barn that Cora stops at on her journey, and we see she eventually escapes all on her own. She has no bearing on the larger plot, barely interacting with or knowing Cora. YetJenkins trusts us to be invested in a short interludeinvolving her finding safety on the Underground Railroad. We’re with her every step of her journey, and relish the moment when she finds solace and reclaims her true identity after years of servitude. This episode serves as a welcome reprieve after so many episodes of stress and danger. It’s as if Barry Jenkinsdecided to put a short filmin the middle of his miniseries as a reminder that he hasn’t forgotten what the true heart of the story is: the sanctity of fighting for the right to live peacefully, free from tyranny, and how the best nourishment when dealing with a cruel world is the love and appreciation we have for each other.
