SLAVERY DEPICTED AS NIGHTMARISH REALITY

JENKINS CREATES GRITTY REALITY OF ESCAPE

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Director Berry Jenkins takes the audience back to the time in America when plantation owners used slaves for labour and a lot of tyranny to keep the slaves in place.

Overtime, abolitionists, free blacks and black slaves created an underground network of escape routes from the Deep South to the north where slavery was outlawed.

Jenkins explores the literal and figurative underground railroad with a blend of realism and fantasy in a 10 episode series, The Underground Railroad (2021).

Fictional characters are layered overtop of the historical truths about the underground railroad and the gritty reality of the times.

Thuso Mbedu plays Cora, a slave whipped and sexually abused on the plantation before she makes several attempts at escape.

Cora shows how even discovering the underground railroad was not enough to find freedom.

Joel Edgerton plays the gritty, determined runaway slave catcher, Ridgeway. 

Ridgeway pursues Cora. And director Jenkins follows Cora and Ridgeway in parallel journeys along the escape routes, discovering along the way bits and pieces of the historical reality of slavery.

Jenkins makes each episode almost an independent film project with the overall series narrative intertwining the story like railroad tracks.

As a historical drama the camera explores in detail the many facets of the Deep South during the time of slavery, including the tyranny used by white plantation owners to instill fear in the slaves. The fear was then manipulated to make the blacks work hard and also put up with other abuses.

Mbedu creates with her character the tone and atmosphere of the frantic escape.

Jenkins oscillates the Cora narrative with the Ridgeway narrative, and then intersects them once in a while to show just how difficult and horrifying escape was for the slaves.

Edgerton develops a gritty character in the backwoods relegated to hunting racoons and other live bush critters for food along the journey. Edgerton merges the authority figure of a bounty hunter with the singular, racist attitude of a slave owner.   

Jenkins uses an ensemble cast with several recurring characters in the two parallel narratives. This interweaving of character stories makes for compelling viewing, while examining the historical truth about the brutality and inhumanity of slavery.

The individual stories are moved along in the narratives with the use of background sounds and a score layered onto live action, and onto the many contemplative moments when the characters reflect with the audience about what is occuring in the storyline.

The series does lack biographical content. Enough is known about the underground railroad that the script could have involved some biopic characters.

The director’s choice of mixing realism with fantasy results in many episodes being presented as a nightmarish dreamscape. The script mixes fact and fiction while Cora works through her own disbelief in what her life has become.

The series should be treated as an artful interpretation of historical truths rather than a drama about historical facts. This marginalization of the material could have been avoided with the use of some biographical characters.

The Underground Railroad is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.