The Underground Railroad
Directed by Barry Jenkins
REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY
10 episodes | Runtime: varies from 20mins to 1hr17
The Underground Railroad is a ten episode television series by Barry Jenkins
Shortly after the American Civil War, the American writer John William De Forest proposed the concept of “the Great American Novel” — a sweeping, significant work that would fully distil a sense of the relatively young country’s soul, capturing a tableau that defined the nation. This idea, both impossible and curiously attractive, has gone in and out of fashion since, a sort of White Whale of literary criticism (Moby Dick being, coincidentally, one of the more obvious candidates).
But prose is an ancient medium, much older than America, and if we were going to pick a medium best suited to defining the soul of the USA, personally I would pick television. There’s been a lot of chat over the last decade or so about the Golden Age of Television, by which is usually meant the Golden Age of American Television, so synonymous is America with TV. Much of it doesn’t live up to the hype, but now, adapted from Colson Whitehead’s masterful novel, we have The Underground Railroad, a series where the hype will instead struggle to live up to the show, which follows the journey of Cora (played by Thuso Mbedu in a career-defining performance), a young woman fleeing slavery in the Deep South. If you’re looking for The Great American Series, this is it.
It’s really not often that a piece of work comes along that is in every conceivable sense operating at the peak of what is possible in that art-form. There’s composer Nicholas Britell’s complex, nuanced score. There’s the fluid, sensitive variation in pacing across the series created by Joi McMillon, Alex O'Flinn and Daniel Morfesis’ organic editing work. Cinematographer James Laxton is at the top of his game, working with light and shade and composition in a painterly fashion that avoids crossing the fine line between crafting an aesthetic and prettifying; I thought of Caravaggio’s ability to portray horror without losing that fundamental sense of horror. Of particular note are The Underground Railroad’s signature tableaux vivants (a fifty minute montage of these form an experimental film in their own right which director Barry Jenkins has made available to view alongside illuminating notes on his process), which succeed in breaking the formal conventions for historical fiction without losing sight of the human beings at the heart of the image-making.
The Underground Railroad is a piece of art in dialogue with other art — more than merely a dialogue, in fact, there’s a vivid sense of active call and response. Each episode ends with a piece of contemporary music over the credits that reminds us that these events, which are fictional but also factual, are intimately connected to the present, that historical events aren’t nearly as remote as you may feel: this is America. And yes, Childish Gambino’s ‘This Is America’ is one of Jenkins’ touchstones here.
Barry Jenkins’ work to date (Medicine for Melancholy, Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk) has been the work of a very talented film director, but the scope and scale of The Underground Railroad has allowed him to unlock something on another level of artistic accomplishment, creating a living, breathing national epic for the ages.
THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD (2021) Written by Jihan Crowther, with Allison Davis, Jacqueline Hoyt, Barry Jenkins, Nathan Parker, Adrienne Rush | Based on the novel by Colson Whitehead | Shot by James Laxton | Edited by Joi McMillon, Alex O'Flinn and Daniel Morfesis
This ten episode series is available to watch on Amazon Prime
