The Barry Jenkins Amazon series saves perhaps its most poignant story for its final episode
Phil Owen | May 15, 2021 @ 10:48 AM
Amazon Prime Video
(This article contains spoilers for the finale of “The Underground Railroad” on Amazon Prime Video)
Throughout the ten episodes of Barry Jenkins’s “The Underground Railroad” on Amazon, Cora (Thuso Mbedu) often thinks about her mother, Mabel.
Mabel (Sheila Atim) is out of the picture before the series begins. As the story goes, she ran away from the Randall plantation where she and Cora had spent their whole lives when Cora was young. And she got away, apparently the slave catcher Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton) says Mabel was the only slave who’s run away from Randall that he wasn’t able to catch.
May 13, 2021 Share
When Oscar-winning director Barry Jenkins was considering adapting Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the Underground Railroad into a limited series, he kept hearing the same thing: Impossible.
It would be emotionally and mentally draining, Jenkins knew. And he questioned the ethics of such a production: Do people really need to be reminded about the horrors of slavery?
Ultimately, Jenkins worked through the doubts. The result is “The Underground Railroad,” an unflinching portrayal of Cora, an enslaved woman who escapes a Georgia plantation and its horrors only to be pursued by an unrelenting bounty hunter. Along the way she must confront the anger she feels for her mother, who left her at the plantation when she was 10.
The Underground Railroad Review: Thuso Mbedu infuses her role with empathy and humanity, captures both terror and tenderness. Joel Edgerton's is a powerful presence. Chase W. Dillon is a consummate scene-stealer.
Save this story for later.
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.