‘The Underground Railroad': Fantasy Version of Slavery is Meant to Cuddle the ‘Safe Space’ Generation [Review]

Here is a fantasy version of slavery. “The Underground Railroad”, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead's 2016 novel of the same name, was directed and largely written by one Barry Jenkins. The end result of this ten-episode Amazon series is an incoherent mess jammed with useless soliloquys, unnecessarily redundant flashbacks and ill-advised preciousness. This is to be expected from media-driven “auteur” Jenkins. As much as his champions would like not to believe it, Jenkins is not a subtle filmmaker; quite the opposite, almost every frame he conceives in his films might as well come with an exclamation point in the end.

South African actress Thuso Mbedu plays a slave named Cora who manages to escape her brutal Georgia plantation, and by brutal I do mean the all-encompassing definition of that word. The white and very racist owner burns slaves alive and whips them to near collapse for the entertainment of his posh dinner guests. Cora manages to find the Underground Railroad, which Jenkins and Whitehead mollify here as a way for slaves to escape to the Northern states via a “magical” train, but in real life the railroad was a network of safehouses that helped escaped slaves reach free states and Canada (there was no train).

Cora’s journey is a peculiar one; she hops the train from Georgia to Tennessee to Indiana, still not feeling at home in any of these states. Instead, she wonders if there is such a thing as “home” in a country so racially toxicized that she might as well just be in hiding for the rest of her life. Hot on her trail is Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton) and his young black protegee Homer (Chase Dillon). Jenkins means to imply that Ridgeway isn’t all that bad, after all, a flashback episode does show him having had a father sympathetic to the black cause. With the ghost of his father hovering over his shoulders for most of his adult life, Ridgeway decides to become a slave catcher. His job is to find and bring back escaped slaves to the plantation with the assistance of an all-too-eager Homer.

Mbedu lacks the screen presence to make you fully care for Cora’s plight. She tries her damnest to cry on cue at every opportunity, but, much like Jenkins’ direction, it turns into an unconvincing bout of style over substance. Edgerton and Dillon fare better. In fact, they are the most interesting characters Jenkins and Whitehead have concocted in this near-11-hour-epic. The mysteries underlying these two men, one white, the other black, is of the upmost interest to us because it shows a parental connection between two people who should, by all accounts, not like each other. Jenkins doesn’t delve too deeply into Ridgeway and Homer’s past and maybe that’s a good thing, leaving underying mysteries about their history together.

‘Underground Railroad’ is handsomely shot, but a convoluted epic, loaded with Jenkins’ penchant for slo-mo imagery and picturesque close-ups. It’s an embellished take on black history, one which doesn’t hold a candle to the artful resonance Steve McQueen brought to his “12 Years A Slave.” There isn’t a feeling of authenticity here. Instead, there’s the naive minimizing of slavery. An almost inaccessible topic sugar-coated for the snowflake generation.

Of course, it is no surprise that a filmmaker like Jenkins would take a page out of the New York Time’s controversial 1619 project and go full alt-history with his version of black slavery. Based on the endless raves “The Underground Railroad” has gotten, this ten-episode series is supposed to cinch Jenkins’s auteur credibility but I’m not buying it. Au contraire, you see, nobody will admit it, but Jenkins is a press-created construct. An artist who was at the right place and at the right time when his slight, but effective “Moonlight”’ took film festivals by storm in the fall of 2016 and ended up winning the Best Picture Oscar the following year.

To make slavery this easy to watch, Jenkins has shrunken the magnitude of what was one of the darkest stains in U.S. history. It deliberately attempts not to offend, but to instead make tragedy accessible via artfice and lies.

SCORE: C-