Perhaps Barry Jenkins’ biggest claim to fame is as a party to an accident. At the climax of the 2017 Academy Awards, presenters Warren Beaty and Faye Dunaway were handed the wrong envelope and mistakenly announced La La Land as the winner of Best Picture. In fact, the winner was Jenkins’ film Moonlight.
It was the right choice. La La Land is an entertaining piece of craftsmanship, but Moonlight is legitimately one of the best films of the 21st century. Jenkins has the rare combination of complete technical mastery and a deeply empathetic mind. In other words, he can not only frame a good shot, he knows how to get the best from actors, too. Both skills are included in the “director” job description, but you’d be surprised how many well-paid people lack chops in one category — or both.
Jenkins, a native of Florida, cut his teeth in the low-budget indie world, and his projects until now have been as modestly scaled as they are brilliantly executed. Even his historical drama, the 2018 adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk, which earned Regina King a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, remained focused on the story of two star-crossed lovers. With his new limited series for Amazon, The Underground Railroad, Jenkins’ vision was given the opportunity to expand to epic size. The director is more than up for the challenge.
The Underground Railroad is based on a novel by Colson Whitehead, which has been confounding genres and expectations since it was published in 2016. It’s a rare bird that won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. In Whitehead’s alternate American South of the 1850s, the Underground Railroad is not a secret network of safe houses and smuggling routes set up by Abolitionists and free Blacks to transport slaves to the free states of the North, and eventually Canada, but instead an actual railroad that runs underground. That detail, in which the metaphorical is made real, is key. This story is not about the historical reality of Antebellum America, but the psychological reality of Black experience in America.
Cora (Thuso Mbedu) is a slave on a plantation in Georgia. Her mother disappeared from the plantation years ago, when Cora was a child, and is assumed by local slave catcher Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton) to be the rare Black person who actually escaped the clutches of the Southern racial caste system. In the harrowing opening episode, we see the price of a failed escape, as Big Anthony (Elijah Everett) is tortured to death for the amusement of his masters’ garden party. The image of the plantation owners dancing a minuet while burning a man to death might seem over-the-top if the florid cruelty of Jim Crow lynchings wasn’t so exhaustively documented.
Cora is convinced to flee with her friend Caesar (Aaron Pierre), and they plunge into a series of adventures all over the South as they flee the relentless Ridgeway. Jenkins is cinema’s foremost romantic — his stories have always revolved around the core of a beautiful love story — but the relationship between Cora and Caesar takes a back seat to the creation of spiraling tension and otherworldly images. It’s never clear where Cora’s dreams and visions end and the “real world” begin. She flashes back to memories of fear and mistreatment on the farm, and her trauma manifests in unexpected ways.
But Cora’s not the only one living in a dream world. The racial apartheid system ties everyone into cognitive knots. Cora’s first stop is a utopian community in South Carolina, where progressive white benefactors are running a research program “for the potential betterment of Negro lives.” That facade soon falls apart. Alternate North Carolina, where Black people have been completely exterminated and outlawed, operates like Nazi Germany during the Final Solution, right down to an Anne Frank figure hiding in an attic. Both racists and abolitionists believe they are doing what the Bible tells them to do. Most chilling of all is Ridgeway’s sidekick Homer (Chase Dillon), a 10-year-old Black boy who is a fearsome, emotionless slave catcher.
Jenkins is one of the most talented composers of images working today. Every few minutes, he throws out a shot that would be a career high for lesser talents. His color sense is simply unmatched. The visual fireworks are coupled with striking, subtle performances from Mbedu and Pierre — and, really, everyone on the screen. The Underground Railroad joins the ranks of Twin Peaks: The Return and Watchmen as the pinnacle of what ambitious, artful television can achieve. It’s also a warning of, as one “station agent” observes, “The savagery Man is capable of when he believe his cause to be just.”
The Underground Railroad is streaming on Amazon Prime.