The Queen of Katwe
3 out of 5 stars
Rated PG. Directed by Mira Nair.
Starring David Oyelowo, Lupita Nyong’o, Madina Nalwanga.
Opens Friday 9/23.
A viewer goes into Queen of Katwe — the tale of a poor Ugandan girl who becomes an international chess champion, and the coach who guides her along the way — expecting a certain amount of formula. Actually, it's more like formula squared: The plucky underdog sports movie multiplied by the selfless inspirational teacher movie. It's Hoosiers meets Stand and Deliver meets The Bad News Bears meets Dangerous Minds meets Cool Runnings.
And to be clear, this cinematic adaptation of real-life chess master Phiona Mutesi's biography does embody many of the clichés you've seen before. But it's also many things we don't see all that often: a mainstream production from a major studio with nary a white face; a PG-rated family film that manages to be sweet without slipping into saccharine; a story about a teenage girl without any love interest; and, as veteran director Mira Nair herself has pointed out, perhaps the first Walt Disney Pictures film set in Africa that doesn't feature a single talking animal.
A story that in lesser hands could have slipped into irredeemable treacle is elevated here by the excellent cast and Nair's steady hand behind the camera into a winning and eminently likable modern fable. Probably still best-known to North American audiences for 1991's Denzel Washington-starring Mississippi Masala (also set against a backstory of Ugandan hardship) Nair teams here with hand-held cinematographer Sean Bobbitt to bring to life the vibrant and sometimes treacherous streets of Katwe, a village slum outside Uganda's capital of Kampala.
Even amid the privation of Katwe, 10-year-old Phiona (newcomer Madina Nalwanga) and her family stand out as especially poor. She and her brother Brian (Martin Kabanza) are unschooled and illiterate, selling maize in the street to help their widowed and deeply indebted mother, Harriet (Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o), to scrape up barely enough to keep a crumbling roof over their heads.
Brian and Phiona's lives take an unexpected turn when they meet Robert Katende (David Oyelowo), a former soccer player trained as a civil engineer who can only find part-time work as a youth coach at a local church ministry. When he sees neighborhood children sit out the soccer matches because their families couldn't afford medical treatment if they got hurt, he decides instead to teach them a game that requires only a nimble mind. Driven by the opportunity to prove they can beat the wealthy "city boys" in a local tournament at King's College Budo, Katende's team of "Pioneers" soon surpass all expectations.
Phiona, in particular, proves a natural grandmaster, able to visualize eight moves ahead. As her talent takes her to more and more far-flung tournaments — experiencing her first airplane trip on the way to Sudan, competing against the best in the world in Russia — her mother begins to fret that she is being shown a life she will never actually get to lead; that she won't ever again be able to accept the reality of her humble station in Katwe. The stern and traditional mother who serves as a barrier the protagonist must overcome on the way to her dreams is a plot contrivance dictated by formula. But Nyong’o imbues Harriet with pathos and humanity, fleshing her out as a truly three-dimensional character whose drive to preserve her dignity and provide a strong example to her children explains so much of what makes Phiona exceptional.
Queen of Katwe isn't perfect. It's bogged down in parts by a clunky script and the need to hit all its chess metaphors square on the nose. But the fantastic score and the chance to watch Nalwanga's amazingly expressive face are more than enough to cover many sins. That it manages to be genuinely "inspirational," in a time when that descriptor has nearly lost all meaning, qualifies as checkmate.
