2021 Directed by Barry Jenkins
Follow young Cora’s journey as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. After escaping her Georgia plantation for the rumored Underground Railroad, Cora discovers no mere metaphor, but an actual railroad full of engineers and conductors, and a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil.
Barry Jenkins Dede Gardner Brad Pitt Adele Romanski Sara Murphy Richard Heus Jeremy Kleiner Mark Ceryak Colson Whitehead
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Politics and human rights Epic history and literature racism, african american, powerful, hatred or slavery historical, epic, battle, historic or fought political, documentary, president, democracy or propaganda violence, shock, disturbing, brutal or graphic political, president, historical, politician or democracy Show All…
did myself a favor and skipped through most of this banal garbage. images of dark skinned Black people whipped, set on fire, chased, bloodied, defiled and deprived of humanity—brought to you by amazon prime—for the sole purpose of beautifying and trivializing Black history and the suffering of Black people for a disingenuous, entitled audience of predatory revisionist (white) liberals. THEM and when they see us (in which the brutality inflicted upon the Central Park 5 is discriminately dramatized for the sake of ava duvernay's trauma fetish) were mere precursors to jenkins's pompous neglect of the ingenuity and poetic spirituality behind the initial liberation of our people. instead, that poeticism is reduced to a farce via modernist exploitation of Black culture,…
from my latest at vulture:
“It is a masterwork that puts into the spotlight the sheer power and communion that can be found with visual storytelling. This is a series not so much witnessed but felt.”
I went deep and personal with this digging into the visual and sonic grammar, familial history, and why i found cora to be a cipher. hope this resonates.
In Barry Jenkins’ 10-hour historical fantasy miniseries The Underground Railroad, regret is generational, as easily passed down in a family as eye color or hair texture. The Underground Railroad, adapted by the Moonlight director from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2016 novel, takes place in antebellum Georgia. Yet it’d be a mistake to call the series a slave narrative. There’s only pain and suffering in a genre originally constructed to end slavery by explaining the horrors of plantation life to Northern white readers.
That gaze leapt from literature’s pages to dominate contemporary movie screens in films like Amistad, 12 Years a Slave, The Birth of a Nation, and Antebellum. Jenkins eliminates that gaze, using slavery as the canvas for a journey…
Before seeing this series, I remembered how many people who had watched it complained about how unjust it was that the major award had completely disregarded this miniseries. And, while I'm not a believer in conspiracy theories, I think it was kept out because, deep down, they knew that if they paid attention to it, it would be extremely difficult for them not to give it all the prizes, which would be unfair to the other shows.
The Effect
Indeed, what Barry Jenkins and team have accomplished with this brilliant 10-hour production is something few have succeeded in the decades and decades since cinema and then television came into our lives. The impact this series had on me over time…
i truly don't even know how to begin to put this journey into words, what barry jenkins has crafted here is nothing short of phenomenal.
the direction, the score and the cinematography (to no surprise at all with it being from barry and his trusty companions) come together to create a union so deeply powerful that i was left with full body chills countless amounts of times. that score has instantly joined the ranks alongside beale street as one of my all time favourites. however, i think it is the performances that truly stood out to me the most. a large majority of the cast here were new to me and every single person blew me away. each actor, no…
Lyrical, stunning, & enriched by bold metaphorical imagery, Barry Jenkins’ THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD is his best work yet. An epic & important tale, it’s explored through an emotionally intimate gaze to result in a masterwork that deserves to be known as a landmark for the medium.
Nicholas Britell’s incredible score is a highlight too. With this, Moonlight, The King, Succession, If Beale Street Could Talk, and more, he has become one of my favorite composers of the modern era and I can’t wait to see what he does next as well!
hard not to worry when a guy as talented as jenkins goes from a movie like moonlight straight into working for amazon. but man this is pretty major, as dense with critique as it is rich with feeling. it is a little clunky in places (the music choices that end each episode largely work, but the seemingly po-faced "this is america" needle drop at the end of chapter 9 robs a significant moment of some of its power) but when its moments of dreamlike ambiguity collide with deliberately prescient anachronism, well, there's just not many other works like it. so so blessed to have been able to see this in a theater, where its images couldn't be ruined by streaming compression.
I dreamt of green pastures flooded with white cotton, a quaint cabin in the woods and an elderly tree overlooking time passing through generations. And then, I dreamt of red embers breathing against darkness, screams echoing from voids, cryptic verses travelling acres and smoke rising from burnt charred woods. I dreamt of life and death coexisting - mocking the fabrics of reality.
A destructive poetry on celluloid, The Underground Railroad is a caludron fuming with seething rage. Barry Jenkins has crafted a ferocious beast and has left no stone unturned in the unflinching homage to his ancestors.
Elliptical, surreal and a sweeping epic of mind numbing proportions, Jenkins' hallucinatory trip down the bleakest corners of American history muses aching beauty with infernal savagery. A modern masterpiece, indeed.
how do i break it to barry jenkins i stopped watching because i was more hooked on too hot to handle
I didn’t want to just write this off and ripped the trauma bandaid to get it done. It’s beautifully shot and extremely picturesque in every frame, well acted with decently constructed storytelling. Unfortunately, I do not believe this exists to serve me, or any black people in any way. It’s misguided traumacore that’s not offering anything new. My fists were clenched the entire time and though I found specific moments to be incredibly powerful and moving, they were few and far between. I’m tired of seeing black bodies brutalized for the sake of ‘educational entertainment’ and I hope Barry Jenkins, talented as he is, can use all his vision and gifts and look to the future eventually.
More on this…
Barry Jenkins brings to life the achingly beautiful words of Colson Whitehead in this staggering and wholly sublime cinematic odyssey. It’s ten masterfully crafted hours where behind every frame is so much love and passion: from James Laxton’s vivid, poetic images to the enchanting soundscape of singing cicadas and rustling leaves—only elevated by Nicholas Britell’s soul-stirring score. Jenkins unifies these elements to craft a series so heart-wrenching in its depiction of the atrocities of American slavery, but one that revels in the fantastical grandeur of its epic narrative and always avoids the gratuitous & heavy-handed notions of its violence. Instead, Jenkins opts to use the power of landscape, love and mystical imagery for this astounding ode to his ancestors. Essential viewing.
This entire series is extremely hard to digest. It’s hard to watch, hard to talk about and hard to think about. But not at any point did it feel exploitive or gratuitous. Terrible things happened to good people and as much as I wanted to be angry at what happened I know the reality might’ve been worse. The surrealism was excellent, the cinematography was beautiful and the writing was phenomenal as well. I wanted to take this down a star because I thought some episodes meandered but I don’t feel like I’m done with this. There’s so much varied storytelling here, so much to discover through reading and everything. If I could give this four and 3/4s of a star…
