Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities. Relayed in his own unsparing voice, Demon braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, this is the story of an irrepressible boy nobody wants, but readers will love.” (Ron Charles, Washington Post)įrom the acclaimed author of The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees, a brilliant novel that enthralls, compels, and captures the heart as it evokes a young hero’s unforgettable journey to maturity "Demon is a voice for the ages-akin to Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield-only even more resilient.” -Beth Macy, author of Dopesick An Instant Wall Street Journal Bestseller.WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTIONĪ New York Times "Ten Best Books of 2022".Watch it, but slowly, one complex, virtuosic, heartbreaking episode at a time. Mbedu – already a star in her native South Africa – is extraordinary, and embedded in an extraordinary adaptation: hallucinatory, magical, allegorical and yet permanently in the pursuit of historical and eternal truths, the resurrection of lost perspectives and the uplifting of unheard voices. On her flight, at least out from under the constant tyranny of her “owner”, she starts to put herself back together. It seems as if safety will never be found but, as Jenkins has said in interviews, it is also about the rehumanisation of Cora. Ridgeway and his devoted child assistant, an 11-year-old black boy called Homer (Chase Dillon, holding his own in every scene), pursue Cora relentlessly throughout. So what if Cora must work in a “slavery museum” dressed as a native African, and her fellow exhibits are chided for not making their role play in the fake fields “authentic” enough? Darker currents, too, reveal themselves and so the journey, complete with further bodily and psychological horrors, must continue, through a no longer welcoming North Carolina, a Tennessee that has become a blasted wilderness, and more. South Carolina has skyscrapers and welcomes the Black refugees who make it as far as their stop. On the other hand, if there is a viewer who can happily watch more than one, they are probably irrevocably inured to whatever they have seen within anyway.Ĭora makes her way through several states, which exist in a slightly alt-reality America. Viewers and content would have benefited from such breathing room. The visual unpacking (courtesy of Jenkins and his longtime cinematographer James Laxton) of every multi-layered scene is a week’s work alone. This, it may already be clear, is not a series to be binge-watched – so much so that Amazon’s decision to release it all at once looks almost hamfisted, as if they haven’t understood the emotional power, intellectual density or overall heft of what they have been given. And, in between the scenes of absolute horror, Jenkins is at pains to show that even “ordinary” life as a slave is to live, in essence, under terrorism. What have come to be the touchstones of cinematic slavery narratives are there – terrible floggings, sexual abuse and rape, violence in all things – but shorn of any gloss or buffer, anywhere to hide. The first episode concentrates mainly on their hellish existence there under the rule of Terrance Randall, played with a slight cartoon villainy by Benjamin Walker that sits oddly with the carefully grounded, harrowingly realistic depiction of humanity, its evil and its suffering everywhere else, but again this is to quibble. Cora (Thuso Mbedu) and Caesar (Aaron Pierre) take a literal underground railroad towards safety and freedom when they escape the Randall plantation in Georgia. The USP of Whitehead’s book is that it makes real the whisper network of safe houses and sympathetic white people who smuggled enslaved people from the south to the northern, free states and Canada. You could question a couple of the choices made while translating the magical-realist tale of black slavery from page to screen – why devote all of one of the 10 episodes to slave hunter Ridgeway’s backstory but lose the history of the protagonist’s grandmother that Whitehead provides in six short, astonishing pages – but, in the context of the achievement, that would be quibbling for quibbling’s sake. Director Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s prizewinning novel The Underground Railroad (Amazon) is as unbearably bleak, brutal and brilliant as the book.
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