A meticulous adaptation of “The Underground Railroad”

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AT THE END of the first episode of “The Underground Railroad”, Cora, a woman on the run from enslavement on a plantation in Georgia, stands in a railway tunnel reached through a secret hatch in a safe house. She crouches and feels the vibration of a rail. Then the blazing headlight of a train bears down on her miraculously through the darkness.

As in the Pulitzer-winning novel by Colson Whitehead from which the series is adapted, here the underground railroad—a figurative term for the network of clandestine routes and sympathisers that, before America’s civil war, helped escaped slaves flee northwards—is a physical reality, a metaphor made track and steam. It is an outlandish conceit. But, Barry Jenkins, the director of the series’ ten episodes, seems to ask, is it more outlandish, all things considered, than the grotesque historical reality that Cora yearns to leave behind? As Ridgeway, a slavecatcher played by Joel Edgerton, says of the fantastical railroad: “Nothing about the world tells me it’s impossible.”

Cora is played by Thuso Mbedu, a South African actor whose expressions are alternately childish and ancient. She and her co-escapee Caesar (Aaron Pierre) have been forced to watch another man who tried to run being whipped to the point of death, then burned alive as their master and his friends dine and dance. In this first episode, the two dominant colours in a mostly drained palette are the red of blood and the blinding white light that heralds the magical train’s arrival; previously the light beat down on the plantation’s cotton fields and was glimpsed by the burning man in his death agony, a perspective that the viewer briefly and shockingly shares.

Mr Jenkins is the director of “Moonlight”, a delicate, understated film about a young, gay African-American man in Miami that won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2017. He has talked about the risk, in making “The Underground Railroad”, of the cast and crew being “devoured by the barbarity” of slavery. Artistically, the risks of the subject include overwhelming horror and a morally dubious voyeurism. Mr Jenkins avoids them. There is less explicit violence than you might be inclined to remember afterwards. The bloodshed is searing but necessary.

The source material presents another kind of challenge, however. Mr Whitehead’s novel is at once devastatingly realistic and allegorical. Though Cora notionally flees across the pre-civil war South, she in fact travels through a jumbled rendition of African-American history as a whole. Her odyssey takes in abuses from later eras, such as eugenics and covert medical experiments, the fetishisation by white people of African-American culture and debates over the merits of separatism and integration.

Mr Jenkins is faithful to this artistic daring. “If you want to see what this nation’s all about, you gotta ride the rails,” Cora’s first conductor on the railroad says by way of prospectus. “Just look outside as you speed through and you’ll see the true face of America.” In the second episode, she and Caesar live under aliases in an imaginary South Carolina that boasts skyscrapers and elevators. Cora works as an anthropological exhibit, performing her own past as a slave for the enjoyment of white visitors. The black man, Caesar observes, can only prosper “in the white man’s vision of him”. In episode three, Cora hides in an attic in a North Carolina from which all black people are excluded on pain of death. The white community bonds through ritual murder and book burnings.

Writing in the New Yorker in 2016, when Mr Whitehead’s novel was published, Kathryn Schulz warned of the “perilous lure” of the underground railroad for modern audiences. For all the astonishing heroism it involved, she pointed out, the railroad—the subject of several other recent screen dramas—has become, for some white Americans, a moral crutch and consolation out of proportion to its actual scale. That is not its function in this series (nor, indeed, in the novel). Even the relatively benign white people whom Cora encounters can be prejudiced or cruel. She is pursued not just by Ridgeway, the slavecatcher, but by terrible memories which make it clear that her own history, and America’s, can never be outrun.

These hallucinations and flashbacks are among the lavish visual effects that Mr Jenkins uses to evoke Cora’s world. The landscapes of the real South, the towns of the counterfactual version and the catacomb-like tunnels are meticulously realised. So is the haunting, clanging soundscape.

The main flaw in “The Underground Railroad” is inherent in its central conceit. Since realism and allegory demand different sorts of responses, it is hard to combine allegorical messages with fully realised characters and a compelling plot. Mr Jenkins does not pull that trick off consistently. But a show with ambitions as grand as his may be bound to fall short in some of them.

“The Underground Railroad” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video now