Movie Review: Queen of Katwe
Directed by Mira Nair, Disney’s reality-based Queen of Katwe—based on an article by Tim Crothers for a Disney-owned ESPN publication and written by William Wheeler (The Hoax)—moves through layers to unfold an incredible if familiar story of a poor child who becomes a champion.
The competition centers on the board game chess. Compressed into a five-year time frame, with David Oyelowo (Selma) as the coach, the occasionally generic movie about winning with good character is elevated by two actresses; one playing the child and the other as her mother.
The kid is portrayed by Madina Nalwanga, whose strong cheekbones and determined manner give her the stone face of a champ in training. But Nair directs her to act with her face and the result is a wider arc for her glory. The mother, a Christian widow who sells vegetables in a poor village in Uganda, Africa, to support her four children, is powerfully portrayed by Lupita Nyong’o (Star Wars: The Force Awakens, 12 Years a Slave). Oyelowo and cast are fine as well.
The screenplay is fine, too, with good lines, especially for the coach, who decides to teach chess to poor kids in Katwe while considering better paying work to support his family. Queen of Katwe holds that money is a means to an end and that living in poverty is not a virtue. For example, toward the end, when an endeavor for which one of the main characters ought to earn a reward becomes known, someone asks: “Was she paid?”
So, don’t confuse Queen of Katwe with Fox Searchlight’s Beasts of the Southern Wild or Slumdog Millionaire, which this sometimes resembles, for putting forth suffering as a virtue. This is a subtly but conclusively pro-capitalist movie.
To that point, Nair struggles to inject religion into the plot, but it doesn’t really fit and it drags the movie, which takes too long to gain momentum. Queen of Katwe thrives when engaging its conviction that a child must be loved, nourished, taught and given the tools to hold herself as the highest value. In this way, Akeelah and the Bee, the South Central Los Angeles teacher-student drama financed by Starbucks, came to mind.
Nair provides an immersion in African life, with soccer, dancing, bargaining and various multicultural, including Islamic, influences through a predictably colorful crew that the coach assembles. Katwe’s chess team competes among children of Africa’s status quo, granting jabs at cronyism and the Islamic dictatorship Sudan.
Queen of Katwe gets distracted and tries too hard to demonstrate multiculturalism. But chess-playing Phiona’s 2007-2011 journey from illiterate villager to chess champ reading Garry Kasparov’s Test of Time is earned, if pre-ordained, through hardship, loss of innocence and, finally and fully, happiness. Nalwanga is best in scenes of concentration, in which the girl plays chess (chess players may want more focus on the game). Nalwanga’s Phiona shows the strenuous effort to purge self-doubt and emerge with the choice to induce thoughts, strength and pride. Lupita Nyong’o cultivates this theme with her parenting portrayal, which shifts the plot from gamesmanship to family as a wellspring to success, though it’s Oyelowo’s coach who delivers the explicit theme that students should use their minds. As in Akeelah and the Bee, the rational child is portrayed as virtuous for her rationality.
This, more than the game and its pieces and moves, makes Queen of Katwe a good family film.