6/28/2023 0 Comments The railroad story![]() ![]() Movie Interviews Jenkins' 'The Underground Railroad,' Balances Beautiful Images With Brutalityīut when Cora and another slave - the blue-eyed, stalwart Caesar (Aaron Pierre) - make it to the underground railroad, they find it actually is a railroad: a winding set of tracks deep beneath the earth used to ferry Black people away from the horrors of the slave-owning South. But Jenkins' limited series for Amazon Prime Video adopts Whitehead's use of magical realism to conjure a tale rooted in painful authenticity, guided by poetic fantasy. On the surface, it's a story about an orphan slave, Cora Randall (Thuso Mbedu), who uses the underground railroad to escape a brutal, 19th century-era Georgia plantation. These depictions enable this talented Black director/producer/writer to tell an epic story about Black people - building a TV masterpiece in the process. But, for me, The Underground Railroad mostly earns the right to deploy such terrible, emotionally devastating moments. There has been a lot of discussion in pop culture circles about the depictions of Black pain in recent films and TV shows I'll engage that debate more fully later. (Warning: This column contains descriptions of racialized violence and discusses some plot points in The Underground Railroad series.)įor this Black TV critic, completing Barry Jenkins' ambitious, beautifully brutal, 10-episode adaptation of Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroadwas an emotional journey that touched every nerve of what it feels like to be a person of color striving to matter in America. Barry Jenkins served as showrunner, executive producer, writer and director to the 10-part Amazon series, The Underground Railroad.
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