Not the most powerful: the “Queen of Katwe”

By N.B.

WHEN the Academy Award nominations were announced this year, the embarrassing paucity of black directors and actors in contention prompted the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite to buzz around social media. 2016 marked the second year in a row in which all 20 of the acting nominations went to white men and women, despite strong performances by black actors in “Creed”, “Beasts of No Nation” and “Straight Outta Compton”. There should be slightly more diversity next time. Several dramas about African and African-American characters have had rapturous receptions at festivals, including “The Birth of a Nation”, “Moonlight”, “Southside With You” and “Loving”. Now there is “Queen of Katwe”, which tells the feel-good true story of Phiona Mutesi, a Ugandan chess prodigy who learnt the game while she was an illiterate girl in the Kampala slum district of Katwe. The film is a Walt Disney production, so it is quite a jolt to realise that there are no white actors in it with any dialogue of more than a few seconds. Mira Nair, its director, has called it “a radical film for Disney to make”.

Ms Nair (“Monsoon Wedding”) was the obvious candidate for the job, having worked in Uganda for decades, and set up an annual film-making workshop there in 2005. Her representation of Kampala may fall back on all the usual signifiers of developing-world vibrancy—brick-red roads, brightly patterned textiles, spicy food, energetic music—but it includes a few specifics of slum life which hit harder than typical Disney fare. Phiona’s family has to pay an exorbitant rent for their tiny shack. Education for her and her siblings, who sell maize cobs to commuters in passing cars, is too expensive to countenance. Her best bet is to follow her older sister’s example, and catch the eye of a well-off man.

Adapted from a book by Tim Crothers, the film features two of the industry’s most magnetic black actors. David Oyelowo (Martin Luther King Jr in “Selma”) co-stars as Robert Katende, a trained engineer who can’t get a job and has to settle for teaching sports and games to under-privileged children. Phiona’s widowed mother, Harriet, is played by Lupita Nyong’o, who has had to wait two and a half years for an on-screen role since she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for “12 Years a Slave”. (To Hollywood’s shame, all she has done in the meantime is voice computer-generated beasties in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and “The Jungle Book”.) Both actors are a pleasure to watch, but Robert’s sparkle and Harriet’s fiery conviction leave Phiona (Madina Nalwanga) looking dull in comparison. She isn’t a pawn, exactly, but she isn’t the proactive or powerful character that the film’s regal title implies.

When she wanders into the dirt-floored barn where Robert is teaching chess, he quickly identifies her as a “fighter”, but she doesn’t appear to be any tougher, braver or more cunning than her peers. She is just better at chess. If there are sacrifices to be made, it is Robert and Harriet who have to make them. Phiona doesn’t even have to say thank you. It is possible that young viewers will be inspired by the none-too-subtle life lessons in Robert’s chess tuition (“Don’t be quick to tip your king”, “Follow your plans and you will all find safe squares”), but they won’t be inspired by his sullen protégée.

What’s more disappointing is how conventional the plotting is. All too predictable for a film which keeps stressing the importance of making unpredictable moves, “Queen of Katwe” pursues a straightforward underdog narrative. Phiona repeatedly travels to tournaments with her comic-relief sidekicks and defeats players who are more smartly dressed than she is (and are therefore unworthy of our sympathy). These sequences have their charms: at one foreign tournament, the children are intoxicated by their first taste of tomato ketchup. But the film never approaches “Slumdog Millionaire” levels of excitement. It would take a zippier director than Ms Nair to get our blood pumping with shots of two people sitting opposite each other and frowning at chess boards.

Perhaps the shortage of thrills and surprises was deliberate. The film’s screenwriter, William Wheeler, has said that he and Ms Nair’s goal was to “gently expand the idea of what a ‘Disney film’ could be” and to tell “a pretty authentic story about Uganda and Katwe while still keeping in mind that this is a Disney movie”. In short, they didn’t want to alienate mainstream family audiences from their African tale, so they veiled its harsh milieu with a bland heroine and an unchallenging structure. If their tactic works, and Disney-film viewers become less afraid of films set in Africa, then fair enough. “Queen of Katwe” isn’t a triumph, but maybe its makers are playing the long game.