Chess movie follows familiar path but retains our interest
They don’t make movies about people who fail.
So the challenge for “inspirational sports stories” — apart from the fact there’ve been a thousand of them — is you know it will end up someplace inspirational. All our hero’s obstacles are, by definition, mere setbacks. Thus, in Disney’s Queen of Katwe, you don’t have to know that Uganda’s Phiona Mutesi is a world-class chess player to figure out that she’s going to be one. But within the confines of a too-familiar true-story format, director Mira Nair (Mississippi Masala) manages to create a naturalistic environment — the meaner streets of Uganda — and a context for the game of chess that is meaningful to its characters and fresh for us.
Newcomer Madina Nalwanga gives a surprisingly nuanced performance, as a little girl (and later, a teen) seemingly doomed to a life of selling corn on the streets to support the tenuous shanty existence of her mother and siblings. Everybody wants a way out. Phiona’s path seems clear from the moment a youth worker named Robert Katende (David Oyelowo) introduces her to a jury-rigged chess board. The street-level instructions — “the little man” reaches the final square and becomes a Queen — appeals to her circumstance and dreams, as does the advice that every dangerous situation on the board has a “safe space.”
A savant, Phiona’s brain soon is working eight moves ahead, and Katende is left with the quandary of how to nurture a prodigy.
And then there’s Phiona’s mother (Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong’o), who, despite her ingeniousness and cynicism in raising a family with nothing, is flummoxed by the idea that a board game could raise her daughter from the slums (she thinks it has to do with gambling). It’s fair to say Nyong’o provides the movie its most solid character, one who saves it from being the story of nice people doing nice things.
To be sure, this is a sweet film with a modicum of drama (the central one is a subtle plot turn involving Phiona overestimating herself too early).