![]() ![]() He is not a slaveowner but shares and spouts their certainty about the white man's superiority, an idea he chillingly calls "the American imperative". Edgerton makes Ridgeway complex and vicious, never sympathetic but always more than a clichéd villain. Most episodes here are an hour long, but one flashback instalment to Ridgeway as a young man (Fred Hechinger) is only 40 minutes, and reveals the cruelty that was always in him. But Jenkins occasionally breaks the typical, plot-driven miniseries form. With Ridgeway endlessly in pursuit, Cora is captured and escapes more than once. They are physical presences, alive with significance, even if they are no longer living in Cora's world. Many are dead but they are not translucent ghostly images. Among the more effective poetic touches, Jenkins frequently shows characters standing still before the camera, looking at us. She tumbles down a hole, floating like Alice In Wonderland, only to arrive in a dank, dirt-floored tunnel. Like the landscape, the fantastical elements reflect her hopes and fears. Jenkins's imagery reflects both the world around Cora and her state of mind, as she travels through a scorched landscape in Tennessee on to a lush green farm in Indiana. The town, with its intentionally anachronistic skyscrapers, may seem to point to a better future, but that beneficent world is not what it appears.Įvery one of Cora's steps toward freedom leads to a cruel reversal, and Mbedu fiercely reveals her increasing determination to keep moving toward the future. On display behind glass, she performs the role she recently lived, picking cotton. But she also works in a museum that stages scenes of slave life. ![]() Cora wears a tailored yellow dress and hat, takes lessons in a classroom and waltzes with Caesar under glowing lanterns at a dance in the town square. Her first stop off the railroad is a bright, urbane town in South Carolina, where a group of white people educate and sponsor the futures of black people. But in a dream, Cora enters a large, gleaming station brimming with people, where uniformed staff wait behind a ticket counter. One of the stations is no more than a dark tunnel and a handcar. Jenkins finds a balance by making the railroad physically believable yet at times fantastical. Reading about a literal underground railroad is one thing, but seeing it on screen takes the metaphor one step closer to reality. Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton, in another of his quietly intense performances) is determined to find Cora because he has failed to capture her mother, who disappeared from the plantation when Cora was a girl, an abandonment that left her so haunted and angry she dreams of slashing her mother's throat with a knife. He is one of many characters displaying the range of attitudes among the enslaved, saying, "I won't be bred like cattle". Throughout the series, the scenes of slaves whipped, hanged and burned are all the more effective for being used so judiciously.Įventually Cora flees the plantation with her friend Caesar (Aaron Pierre). At the start, Cora, played with great assurance by the South African actress Thuso Mbedu, is surrounded by brutality but accepts her fate. Here Jenkins establishes Cora's world before moving in a more fantastical direction. In the first episode, that unflinching depiction of plantation life might bring to mind Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave, but McQueen and Jenkins are very different artists. – Mare of Easttown review: a superb thriller As she does, a flow of poetic images – a tree blazes with fire or stands stark and bare in the landscape – live alongside occasional depictions of slaves whipped and tortured. The main character, Cora, makes several stops on the railroad's route as she runs from enslavement on a Georgia plantation, pursued obsessively by a slavecatcher named Ridgeway. As in his Oscar-winning Moonlight (2016) and If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), every image is gracefully composed, shimmering with imagination and compassion. Jenkins teases out and emphasises both the book's harsh physical realism and its inventions, shaping them in his distinct style. The visible and the invisible, realism and fantasy, meet in this beautiful and searing series from director Barry Jenkins. The real underground railroad, the historical 19th-Century network of people and safe houses that helped slaves escape, becomes a literal, physical trainline carrying people to safety in Colson Whitehead's novel, on which the show is based. ![]()
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