The Regal Dignity of Mira Nair’s “Katwe”

There is an ocean of distance between modern studio marketing and the experienced reality of a film. The spectacular, pulsating trailer for a thriller can often mask a morbidly dull slog. Or in the case of Disney’s new film “Queen of Katwe,” an exuberant musical montage selling an “inspirational true story” can mask a subversive and profound work of art. It is rare for our society — and therefore our cinema — to address the uncomfortable and intractable truth of poverty. “Queen of Katwe” breathes in it. It is a non-voyeuristic invitation to experience how the other ninety percent of our world lives. Sometimes too much truth is hard to sell.

On the surface, this Ugandan story was marketed to multiplex audiences as an inspirational Disney tale of a young woman overcoming unimaginable odds to become a world chess champion. The heroic tale of an underprivileged prodigy lifted by resilience fits neatly into our “bootstraps” mythology. These inspirational tales drive home the lesson that the strength and responsibility to succeed lie within you. There is nothing structural or unbreakable about our conditions. We make our destinies. It is a narrative so entrenched and cliché in American life that I wrote off “Queen of Katwe.” Despite the rave reviews and glamorous Lupita Nyong’o magazine covers, I wasn’t alone. The film has struggled at the box office.

To be honest, Mira Nair’s film doesn’t quite take off at first. It feels less assured than her freewheeling indie classics Monsoon Wedding and Salaam, Bombay. While it still has the texture of her distinctive sensibility, it can’t shake the trappings of Hollywood convention. There is music, exotic settings and charisma but the proceedings have a paint-by-numbers, episodic quality. But as the film’s title character Phiona Mutesi discovers her gift for chess, Mira Nair’s film begins to soar. I couldn’t have guessed from those early scenes that the director was simply strategically placing her pieces on the board. Nair has her eyes on full-fledged audience checkmate and she triumphs. When Phiona’s ambitions begin to chafe against her impoverished reality, Nair’s instinctive gifts as a storyteller come to life. She is a remarkable chronicler of life on the margins and this is one of her most successful films.

What I didn’t see in Disney’s colorful African-print advertising was the film’s mature and unflinching recreation of Phiona’s world. Context matters and Nair makes it one of her central characters. There are tin sheds, muddy markets, homelessness, prostitution, loss and exasperation. None of this is sentimentalized or exoticized. Lupita Nyong’o struggles to provide her four children with a basic existence and the family labors, laughs, eats and exists within that reality. The film is shot on-location in the streets of Katwe and for an American film to bring that much foreignness to our screens is a triumph in its own right. But Nair wants to do something more subversive than evoke our liberal pity for characters entrapped in vicious cycles of poverty. She has the utmost respect for her characters’ world and frames their struggle as the universal desire to move one’s life forward.

Lupita Nyong’o’s stunning performance is a tribute to any parent’s desire to give their children more than they inherited. She maintains her dignity and self-respect in the face of unimaginable struggles as an impoverished widow. She is illiterate and incapable of understanding her daughter’s chessboard, but she sells her most valuable possession — a regal ceremonial dress — to ensure that her daughter’s reading oil lamp stays alight. In an earlier scene when Phiona faces her first major tournament, she also faces the Kampala elite — the so-called “city boys” in their manicured playgrounds and ironed uniforms. They are the inhabitants of an unattainable, alien world located miles from her mother’s home. It is disorienting and overwhelming. When the children of Katwe are given proper beds for the night before the championship, they are visibly confused. The next morning their coach finds them huddled closely together, sleeping on the floor. They are each other’s strength as they demolish the manicured strategies of their rivals.

“Queen of Katwe” is full of these kinds of unsentimentally observed details that cumulate in an emotional power all too rare in our multiplexes. I found myself in tears on multiple occasions, projecting and reflecting my own struggles in the lives on screen. On a political front, this is a rare film about Africans without a white savior. It shatters our current “diversity” debate by presenting so many different kinds of black lives. It is not interested in accommodating our limitations. It transcends them.

“Queen of Katwe” has found a small but dedicated audience of admirers since it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. On Twitter Mira Nair has shared countless messages of love and admiration from fans around the world. But I sincerely hope this story breaks through the limits of modern marketing to reach the wider audience it deserves. Like its characters, this is a film filled with rare beauty, dignity, and grace. It is based on a true story but it soars because it is resonates with our own truth. Mira Nair’s “Katwe” sings with life.