'Underground Railroad' Is A Hard But Beautiful Reflection On Black Pain – Nation & World News wuft.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from wuft.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
(Warning: This column contains descriptions of racialized violence and discusses some plot points in The Underground Railroad series.) For this Black TV
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In Barry Jenkinsâs reimagining of Colson Whiteheadâs popular novel âThe Underground Railroad,â it is as if the land speaks. In the light of high noon, cotton fields are menacingly fecund, owing to the work of the enslaved laborers who stand painfully erect among the crop, like stalks themselves. At night, a path leading somewhereâwhether to freedom or execution, we donât knowâpulses with death. We have known Jenkins, the director of âMoonlight,â as a portraitist. Here, working again with his longtime collaborator, the cinematographer James Laxton, he is a virtuosic landscape artist. With âThe Underground Railroad,â a compositional achievementâpictorial and psychologicalâJenkins has done for the antebellum South what J. M. W. Turner did for the sea.