The underground railroad here is not the historical “railroad,” which was a network of people, African American as well as white, offering assistance to slaves escaping from the South.
If Beale Street Could Talk) adapts Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel of the same name for this limited series, which chronicles Cora Randall, a runaway slave, and her journey for freedom in the antebellum South. In it, the underground railroad is reimagined into a literal locomotive that runs underground, stopping at different stations to transport Black slaves to freedom. The series incorporates fantasy, which helps alleviate the trauma of some of the harsher scenes and gives the viewer time to recuperate before continuing through the story. The first episode is a difficult one to digest, especially for Black viewers, filled with similar themes one would expect to see in stories of slavery a whipping, a slave being burned alive. However, Jenkins deviates from the trauma porn norm of bloody torment to also portray Black resilience, Black love, and Black joy. Being mindful of everyone s mental health on set, Jenkins brought on a team of therapists to help the actor
Thuson Mbedu as Cora in The Underground Railroad
In four films Barry Jenkins has established himself as a high artist of the Black American experience. Gaining heft and budget from his success with
Moonlight and
If Beale Street Could Talk, Jenkins signed up both Brad Pitt’s Plan B Pictures and Jeff Bezos’ Amazon to tackle one of the biggest projects on race in America, the adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning 2016 novel,
The Underground Railroad.
While it may be tempting to see in Barry Jenkins’ Tolstoyan adaptation of
The Underground Railroad, the influences of painters Julius Block, Kerry James Marshall and various film directors, as the New Yorker did in its review this week. All of us do project a bit of our own influences into likenesses we recognize. I just did with Tolstoy, for it’s clear to me that both Jenkins and Whitehead saw the dying light of a way of illegitimate life in their big canvas stories.
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