Jenkins lets the camera rest on their faces-a signature move, but here the shot is edged with something earthy rather than beatific. He tells Cora that he is “not supposed to be here.” Cora, who believes that her mother, Mabel (Sheila Atim), abandoned her as a child, in pursuit of freedom, scoffs ruefully. She was born enslaved, on a Georgia plantation, and when we meet her she is being pressured by a confidant named Caesar (Aaron Pierre) to escape North. The girl is Cora Randall (Thuso Mbedu, a revelation), who, along with the landscape, holds the soul of this historical fiction. This metaphor made literal is the show’s framing conceit. The darkness is an entryway to a subterranean railroad: a network of trains used to transport enslaved people out of bondage. The scene, which seems to reference the Old Testament story of Jacob’s ladder, puts us in a Biblical mood, and Jenkins’s vision, helped along by Nicholas Britell’s stunning score, is that of Exodus. She is trailed by a flailing man, who, we later learn, is a slave-catcher-the obsessive Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton). There is one recurring slow-motion sequence, of a young Black woman tumbling down a ladder into darkness. In the first two minutes, we are given the meat of Whitehead’s plot, which has been compressed into an Impressionistic montage, priming the audience for an intense experiment in durational storytelling. Turner did for the sea.Īmazon has curiously dropped all ten episodes of this dense miniseries at once. With “The Underground Railroad,” a compositional achievement-pictorial and psychological-Jenkins has done for the antebellum South what J. Here, working again with his longtime collaborator, the cinematographer James Laxton, he is a virtuosic landscape artist.
We have known Jenkins, the director of “Moonlight,” as a portraitist. At night, a path leading somewhere-whether to freedom or execution, we don’t know-pulses with death. 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. In Barry Jenkins’s reimagining of Colson Whitehead’s popular novel “The Underground Railroad,” it is as if the land speaks.
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