In the director’s notes attached to the press preview of The underground railroad, Barry Jenkins seems to identify in the series a first point of arrival for his career.
From the very beginning, in fact, he wanted to do three things: tell a personal story about his origins, and it came out Moonlight, with which he won an Oscar; adapt James Baldwin, and directed If Beale Street Could Talk; finally addressing the theme of slavery, and for this undertaking he turned to the novel The underground railway by Colson Whitehead (released in Italy by SUR in 2017) and decided to bring it to TV. The series of the same name will go to Prime Video on May 14 and is a point of arrival in another sense as well: it is a masterpiece, with an epic grandeur and an indisputable visual power.
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An informal association
The underground railway it was an informal association active in the United States from the early 1800s until the Civil War, which helped blacks to escape from the slave states of the South to the North or Canada. It was a network of shelters – “stations”, often private houses – managed by “capitreno” who knew the paths that connected one shelter to another. It is one of those historical events that in the USA are remembered almost exclusively during the black history month and show how the African American population has always fought to escape from an intolerable and inhuman condition.
The novel
The series, like the novel, literalizes the metaphor by imagining a real railway that runs underground from the South to the North of the country, built by free blacks for their brothers in chains. The protagonist Cora (Thuso Mbedu) escapes the Georgia plantation and passes through Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana, chased by the slave hunter Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton). One of the miracles of the Jenkins series is the ability to create a choral story, of great breadth, universal, despite having a well-determined protagonist and talking about a specific condition. Another is the visual style, which changes profoundly over the course of the episodes but always maintains an indefinable suspension between dream and reality.
The underground railroad it is painful, often difficult to see. But it is also enlightening and beautiful, and will leave its mark.