Barry Jenkins’ extraordinary adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel about escaping the clutches of slavery is hallucinatory and heartbreaking. Just don’t binge-watch it
Director Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s prizewinning novel The Underground Railroad (Amazon) is as unbearably bleak, brutal and brilliant as the book. You could question a couple of the choices made while translating the magical-realist tale of black slavery from page to screen – why devote all of one of the 10 episodes to slave hunter Ridgeway’s backstory but lose the history of the protagonist’s grandmother that Whitehead provides in six short, astonishing pages – but, in the context of the achievement, that would be quibbling for quibbling’s sake.
The USP of Whitehead’s book is that it makes real the whisper network of safe houses and sympathetic white people who smuggled enslaved people from the south to the northern, free states and Canada. Cora (Thuso Mbedu) and Caesar (Aaron Pierre) take a literal underground railroad towards safety and freedom when they escape the Randall plantation in Georgia. The first episode concentrates mainly on their hellish existence there under the rule of Terrance Randall, played with a slight cartoon villainy by Benjamin Walker that sits oddly with the carefully grounded, harrowingly realistic depiction of humanity, its evil and its suffering everywhere else, but again this is to quibble. What have come to be the touchstones of cinematic slavery narratives are there – terrible floggings, sexual abuse and rape, violence in all things – but shorn of any gloss or buffer, anywhere to hide. And, in between the scenes of absolute horror, Jenkins is at pains to show that even “ordinary” life as a slave is to live, in essence, under terrorism. There is no true relief anywhere.
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