A far cry from the sparkle and magic of your favourite Disney movies, The Queen of Katwe is set in the slums of Uganda, its heroine an illiterate and underprivileged young girl.
Only then do we get a piercing sense of real-life hardship and struggle that the film too often soft-pedals for feel-good comfort.The Queen of Katwe is an uplifting and heartwarming new movie, one which will perhaps take Disney fans by surprise. Revealingly, Queen Of Katwe’s most moving sequence occurs during the end credits when the actual individuals come and stand by the actors who portray them. The Oscar-winner fills in Harriet’s blanks - showing how her stubbornness is born from a fear of not raising her little girl’s expectations too much in a society with few opportunities. Newcomer Nalwanga is very likable, holding her own alongside her more-experienced co-stars.Īs for Nyong’o, she’s got the unenviable task of portraying a stern mother who comes to realise how special her daughter is. And yet Robert - like just all chess coaches in the history of cinema - is quick to use every aspect of the game as a metaphor for life, an on-the-nose narrative device that’s overdone no matter how much the actor invests in his speeches. Strict but also silly, Robert is more like a goofy older brother to Phiona than a coach, and indeed the characters’ interactions outside of the de rigueur scenes of preparing for tournaments are among the film’s best moments.
Oyelowo’s kind-hearted performance stands out. With Robert serving as her mentor and her mother playing the unsupportive parental figure who thinks she should face reality and give up on her dream, Queen Of Katwe is too dramatically tidy, each step of Phiona’s remarkable path neutered of drama until it seems preordained. Quickly, she’s the best of the group.)īut these precise cultural observations start to feel like mere grist for what is ultimately a familiar underdog story. (When Robert opens his chess program to Katwe’s children, the boys insist she has no place competing against them. That’s even truer for a young girl like Phiona, who faces resistance asserting her independence simply because she’s a girl. Discovering that Phiona seems gifted at the game, he encourages her to enter competitions, in large part because he wants her to think about escaping a world in which she can’t even afford schooling.īased on a 2011 ESPN The Magazine profile, Nair’s first feature since The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a tasteful, sympathetic look at people learning to cope in difficult circumstances. She soon meets Robert (Oyelowo), who has a passion for chess that he wants to pass along to the local kids. Set in the impoverished Ugandan community of Katwe, the film introduces us to Phiona (Madina Nalwanga), a young, vivacious girl who lives with her siblings and widowed mother Harriet (Nyong’o) in the mid-2000s.
But outside of the family-film crowd, Disney may have a tough time wrangling audiences to this true-life tale. The presence of David Oyelowo and Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong’o will spark interest, as will the story’s sports-movie framework. Premiering in Toronto, Queen Of Katwe is set to arrive in US theatres on September 23. Queen Of Katwe is too dramatically tidy, each step of Phiona’s remarkable path neutered of drama until it seems preordained. Perhaps it’s simplistic to say that director Mira Nair has fashioned a good-looking but Disney-fied version of actual events, and yet the studio’s predictably uplifting-at-all-costs blandness slowly but methodically drains the material of its richness. Queen Of Katwe tells a potentially touching story in the stodgiest of ways, its recounting of the journey of a young Ugandan chess prodigy sensitively rendered but also far too formulaic.