Review: The Underground Railroad Is an Unsparing Depiction of Collective Trauma

Trauma becomes tangible in Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel.

The Underground Railroad
Photo: Kyle Kaplan

“A plantation was a plantation,” Colson Whitehead wrote in his 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Underground Railroad. “One might think one’s misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality.” It’s that sense of infinite trauma—spreading across the United States, backward and forward throughout history, and deep into the souls of the enslaved—that comes across most palpably in the 10-part adaptation of the book, which is unsparingly and expansively directed by Barry Jenkins.

On her flight from the Georgia plantation that her mother vanished from years earlier, Cora Randall (Thuso Mbedu) is asked to share the story of her pain. In Whitehead’s version of history, the railroad isn’t a metaphor but a real underground transportation system with stationmasters and conductors and locomotives, some with curtained windows and wine aboard. Every stop represents a new hope and space for testimony. In each state that Cora disembarks, instead of shedding her history, she reckons with it, giving voice to where she’s been while facing slavery’s long shadow twisted into new forms: the smiling eugenicists glad to teach her how to read, or the religious fanatic (Lily Rabe) eager to save the soul of the woman trapped in her care while neighbors execute a black woman in the public square.

Even when Cora finds refuge (and love) on a black-owned farmstead, a community brimming with care and art and comfort, her emotional and physical scars resurface. As a railroad conductor warns her and her companion, Caesar (Aaron Pierre), her journey North will show her “the true face of America,” and Cora sees the specter of what she left behind again and again. This is a world, after all, where black achievement, exemplified by the railroad that carries Cora from Georgia to Indiana, can only thrive when hidden beneath the earth.

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Horror inconspicuously seeps throughout the pages of Whitehead’s novel, and the most shocking brutalities come and go so softly, sometimes in the space of half a sentence. Not so here: The opening episode is a graphic montage of assault and destruction of black bodies, a terrorscape of violence that feels present in every scene that follows. It doesn’t matter where Cora goes or who goes with her; running away is an option, but escape—escape to safety, escape from memory, escape from the need to keep escaping—is an impossibility.

It’s in the rare moments of joy that Cora experiences that Mbedu’s performance is most meticulous. When Cora smiles, relaxes, even giggles, she transforms, but there’s a shuddering sadness in her eyes that never quite dissipates. And because we’ve seen what she sees, we sense the searing undercurrent of her history and can understand the meaning of her glance: She’s caught in the balance between the promise of a future at peace and the certainty that the past will not leave her alone. In Jenkins’s series, trauma becomes tangible.

It’s harder for us to keep track of Cora’s inner life when she’s most in danger, which is much of the time. Whitehead fills the novel with visits inside his character’s thoughts, especially Cora’s, fleshing out identities beyond the circumstances of terror with crisp precision. But Jenkins, rather than trying to filmically capture that sense of dense perspectives coming into focus, leans in the opposite direction, favoring an abstract mode of storytelling with blurry, lingering shots, prolonged wide shots of tableaux in the distance that make identifying characters impossible, and slow moments of zooming-in on details that don’t necessarily reveal their meaning. Of all the music cues, it seems right that the quintessentially impressionistic “Clair de Lune” should be playing during one such disorienting reverie.

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Jenkins frequently frames his characters in blinding light, the sun burning through the shot, obscuring the actors, rather than illuminating them. But that kind of light draws attention to itself rather than to what—or who—is lit: Jenkins’s storytelling, for all its surprising boldness (like the back-to-back episodes “Fanny Briggs” and “Indiana Autumn” that run 19 and then 70 minutes, respectively) and the stunning geography the camera captures, sometimes acts like that blinding light, pulling focus toward itself instead of the characters.

This adaptation also has an uninspiring investment in Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton), the slavecatcher who failed to find Cora’s mother, Mabel (Sheila Atim), all those years ago, leaving him angrily obsessed with Cora’s recapture. While the novel glances for a few pages on Ridgeway’s youth, Jenkins grants this backstory an entire languorous episode that seems to try to humanize the slavecatcher, or, at least, probe the origins of his inhumanity.

But the adult Ridgeway, played by Edgerton with a steely torpor, doesn’t seem to merit this attention. “So Arnold Ridgeway is human after all,” Cora says, unimpressed by one of her captor’s long-winded monologues about society and their proper places in it. “So here I thought you just some demon who murders folk in cold blood.” Studying Ridgeway, much like scrolling through the Twitter feed of a vocal white supremacist, doesn’t yield much unexpected nuance, and The Underground Railroad, in granting Ridgeway the empathy that he’s unable to show to others, only reinforces the futility of investigating the crudest evil.

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Jenkins, though, has assembled a cast of actors who, mostly confined to one or two episodes, bring a sharp specificity even to the series’s hazier depictions of each character’s relationship to liberation. Calvin Leon Smith desperately animates Jasper, captured by Ridgeway alongside Cora, as a man who believes he can find freedom only by ceasing to fight for it. Amber Gray and Peter De Jersey deliver some of the series’s most impassioned speeches as the gregarious founders of a black community that they’re willing to defend with their lives. And as Royal, who courts Cora in the final few episodes, William Jackson Harper movingly conveys the attempts of a man born into freedom to fully understand the suffering of the woman he loves.

The Underground Railroad’s most haunting performance, though, belongs to Chase Dillon as Homer, an emancipated child who serves as Ridgeway’s loyal, even loving, companion, choosing to manacle himself to the slavecatcher’s wagon every night with his own key and chains. Homer’s inscrutable fear of freedom is at the root of the series’s raw depiction of slavery’s scorching of the spirit. In the opening episode, as Caesar tries to convince Cora to leave with him, he tells her, “I’m not supposed to be here” and she responds with a broken “But I am.” Cora’s freedom from that belief, her ultimate surety in the birthright of her humanity, is the only untainted victory that The Underground Railroad will allow.

Score: 
 Cast: Thuso Mbedu, Chase Dillon, Aaron Pierre, Joel Edgerton, Lily Rabe, Sheila Atim, Calvin Leon Smith, Amber Gray, Peter De Jersey, William Jackson Harper  Network: Amazon

Dan Rubins

Dan Rubins is a writer, composer, and arts nonprofit leader. He’s also written about theater for CurtainUp, Theatre Is Easy, A Younger Theatre, and the journal Shakespeare. Check out his podcast The Present Stage.

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