Disney’s Queen of Katwe is a very nice movie. It politely does exactly what it came to do. No big surprises. And for once, that’s actually a good thing.
The film tells the true story of Phiona Mutesi (Madina Nalwanga), a young Ugandan girl who sells corn on the street and lives with her mother Nakku Harriet (Lupita Nyong’o) and assorted siblings. They’re poor and don’t have too much going on, until Phiona falls in with an impromptu chess school run as a sort of community outreach project by Robert Katende (David Oyelowo). Phiona learns the game, and the ragtag bunch of kids play daily in a corrugated steel shack. Katende decides it’d be jolly to enter them in a regional tournament, and faces predictable prejudice (no poor kids here sir!). With just this much plot as runway, even a novice pilot could bring it on home for landing.
But while a super-gritty struggle-pic it’s not and the outcome is never much in doubt, director Mira Nair takes these warmhearted Disney fundamentals and squeezes from them a bright, sweet little cup of nectar.
Sure, the hardships are mostly predictable — money’s short, the rich kids will never take us seriously, and so on — and the richly-saturated street scenes probably gloss over some of the less pleasant aspects of urban Ugandan life. (Shot on location in the Katwe slums in Kampala, Uganda, there’s a part-voyeuristic, part-travelogue feel — whitewash or not.)
But this is a feel-good tale of nature and nurture driving a heartily underprivileged kid (who nonetheless doesn’t see herself that way) to some fairly heady heights. Lupita Nyong’o is excellent as Phiona’s mother, delivering a strong but nuanced performance in a role that, on first blush, offers little room for subtlety. David Oyelowo is great as well, playing the kind of through-and-through do-gooder that Disney films run on and that we all hope exist, somewhere. And Madina Nalwanga strikes just the right balance as a sometimes frustrated, sometimes petulant, sometimes prideful but always good kid who’s really just a total A-player and learns that winning itself can be, at times, an empty experience. Nair focuses just enough on each of these three main characters, always leaving Nalwanga room to play Phiona as a real, lived-in person. It’s well done.
Call me a pointless nerd, but I felt a bit shortchanged on the chess. For a movie ostensibly about the game, there’s hardly any of it actually played on screen. It’d be tough to make a football movie that didn’t show the big game, or a racing film that made do with third party descriptions of the championship — but that’s essentially what Queen of Katwe does. We’re never shown much of a game — just a couple of aw-shucks mates likely to impress people who don’t play too much. I don’t need to watch Kasparov finger-twiddle through a four-hour showdown with Deep Blue, but it would’ve been nice to drop at least a couple of nice sequences in.
On the flip side, this dearth of actual chess play makes way for something arguably much more satisfying — the use of chess as metaphor. Here, the small can become strong; the pawn can become queen; the poor can defeat the rich, and so on. It’s an ongoing riff that keeps delivering throughout the film.
You might be tempted to skip this movie because it’s a formulaic little Disney feel-gooder with a bit too much exoticism for your matinee tastes. Don’t. Queen of Katwe is well done, authentic, and despite its probably 20%-too-cheery gloss on everything it touches, very much worth your time.
And stay for the end credits, which offer a nice spin on the typical true-story reveal. Oh, also, there’s a bumpin’ song.
Haus Verdict: No surprises in terms of plot, but an inspiring true story, colorful location shooting, and top-drawer performances carry the day.
Queen of Katwe opened Friday September 30.
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