BEST OF 2019: The Love and Details of QUEEN & SLIM
Queen and Slim came out in a very loaded November and it took me a few weeks to finally catch up with it. I was sold by the trailer and was really excited for the film, but by the time I was ready to see it, my expectations had dipped slightly. The reaction was relatively muted in the critical community. I figured it was good, but perhaps was not as good as I was hoping it would be.
I was wrong. It was better. A lot better. And I’m a little stunned that this movie — despite getting good reviews and a pretty healthy box office run — did not achieve a more enthusiastic following among critics. The screenplay Lena Waithe (who shares story credit with James Frey) is a sharp, really well-observed thing. Waithe never goes the obvious route with her characters. And the world is as three-dimensional as her creations. This is not a film about black people versus white people. It even wants you to understand that black people are not homogeneous. There is a tendency in some similar films to do just that, or to have one black character who doesn’t think the way all the other black characters do and then that character is villainized.
Waithe’s world is so much richer than that. Nearly every black individual you meet is just that: an individual with independent thoughts. There are depictions of mob mentality — which is as real as it is unavoidable in the real world. But the point is there is a racial complexity that exists in this film that is extremely rare and she deserved a lot more recognition than she received last award season.
The same could be said for Melina Matsoukas who is as important to the film’s artistic success as Waithe. Matsoukas has a poetic eye and a clear understanding of the power of iconography. The famous depiction of Queen and Slim (we don’t learn their real names until much later), the characters, the icons (headlining this piece above), is something else. It doesn’t come close to defining who these two individuals really are, but it nails the fantastic — the sexy, anti-authoritativeness the two came to symbolize. And to a degree, they start to become those people. In this, I mean, they begin to live the lives of legends, their normal behavior transmitting as the sort of things that become legendary.
In one of the film’s greatest scenes, Queen and Slim stop by a bar (pointedly titled, The Underground). Slim wants a drink and wants to dance. Queen is worried they will get recognized. But Slim is exhausted from running and hiding. They both are. They want to feel what its like to live like truly free people again. If they go into the bar for a beer and a dance and get recognized and, later, caught, they are dopes. Instead, they go into the bar for a beer and a dance, get recognized… and then drink and dance some more (there is a thin line between living the life of a legend and living the life of a dope). There they slow dance, holding one another, feeling as free as any black couple should feel… the weight of the law and authority briefly forgotten.
I love that this is not a film about lovers on the run. Instead, our two leads slowly fall in love as they deal with the emotional and metaphysical realities of their lives as criminals on the run. They get to witness in each the best and worst of their personalities. And they choose to love each other.
I’ve been dancing around the premise so here it is. If you don’t already know, Queen and Slim is about two people who go out on a first date and somewhere along the way get pulled over by a police officer for some traffic infraction. Normally, this would not be much of a story. But Queen and Slim are African American. So the story doesn’t end there. It only begins. The cop is abusive. He’s instigating. He doesn’t want to go home without something happening — what that something is he may not even know. As the driver, Slim is largely cooperative. As the passenger, Queen grows increasingly frustrated and defiant. She’s a lawyer. She understands their rights. You could make the case she should have swallowed the abuse of power. Maybe they would have been alive one day. But when she goes for her phone to record the event, the officer sees this as a physical threat and draws his weapon. Slim likely saves her life by knocking the gun out of the officer’s hand and wrestling with him afterward. Eventually, they are wrestling with one another while going for the gun. At this point, this much is clear: whoever gets the gun is going to live and whoever doesn’t is going to be killed. Slim gets to the gun. The cop is killed.
The complexity of this event is one of the film’s strong points. Waithe and Matsoukas could have manufactured something a lot more obvious, but there is just enough detail and nuance to make you question one or two of their choices. Later in the film, an African American mechanic working on their car tells them they should have just kept their mouth shut and went home. What he really means is: you should have just suffered the indignities and maybe (just maybe), you’d have lived to tell the tale and wouldn’t be on the run. I am not mocking this stance, though the temptation is there. I can’t. It is likely what I would have done. You can call the mechanic cowardly. But his stance is he is willing to take a metaphorical spit in the face if it means he lives another day to take care of his wife, his son and his other responsibilities. They, he’d argue, are more important to him than his own dignity. Then again, you never know — this mechanic doesn’t truly know — what will trigger you into doing something you will later regret.
When you weigh their so-accused poor choices in the event against those made by the police officer, it is near impossible to side with the law. The police are paid by us the tax payers to serve and protect us. And for far too many people, not just African Americans, but especially for African Americans and other minorities of color, the police are… well, we don’t really need to say more do we?
Queen and Slim is a scream of the black experience in 2019 filled with cultural symbolism and images hard to shake. It has a clear point of view, but within that point of view is welcomed complexity and nuance. The film appears to to have a love-hate relationship — or rather a love-skeptical relationship about some of the institutions surrounding the black experience (such as religion).
It’s an angry picture, that acknowledges the blowback that results from such anger. Black people get angry at the way they are treated, leading to multiple forms of protest. Amid protest someone takes things too far and acts of violence are inevitable. If the acts of violence are against authority figures, those institutions of authority use the violent acts as confirmation bias and double-down on authoritarian tactics or discriminating beliefs. The process repeats. If the acts of violence are against the disenfranchised… the process repeats. And so Queen and Slim doesn’t back down from this anger because ultimately the anger is righteous.
To anyone making the case that there were not more performances by persons of color to consider in the Oscar categories for acting, they needn’t look far. Jodie Turner-Smith’s turns in a lively, sensual performance as Queen. Bokeem Woodbine has had quite the renaissance these past few years and he essentially steals every scene he’s in as Queen’s criminal, resourceful Uncle Earl. And we may just be taking Daniel Kaluuya for granted at this point, but this might be my favorite performance he’s given yet. Their chemistry is palpable — this is easily the most deeply romantic film of the year. The way they fall for one another doesn’t feel dressed up or forced. It feels inevitable. The circumstances, unnecessary.
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