YAS QUEEN, SLAY
Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King does battle with warrior-class conventions
The kinetic action and adventure of The Woman King makes for thrilling entertainment, but the film is also a story of unwavering resistance in front of and behind the camera. The ascendancy of women filmmakers over the past decade is one of the great chapters in movie history, and as women have fought their way back into the field, they have also taken up space — on screens and in minds — long denied them. Their canvasses are again as expansive as their desires.
Certainly one of the most expansive of these canvasses is The Woman King, a drama about the real women soldiers of the precolonial Kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa. Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, the movie is filled with palace intrigues, sumptuous ceremonies and stirring battles, and it features, as golden-age Hollywood liked to brag, a cast of thousands (or thereabouts!). Yet, although it evokes the old-fashioned spectacles the studios habitually turned out long before Marvel, there is no precedent for this one.
The story, as moviemakers also like to say, is “inspired” by real events, which in this case are mind-blowing. The tale is rooted in the women warriors of Dahomey whose exact origins remain obscured by tribal myths and oral traditions as well as the obviously biased, self-serving and, at times, contradictory accounts of European observers. It’s thought that the warriors emerged in the 17th century and were part of a mostly female social organisation that included lots of wives and a palatial compound with his and her sides. (The stronghold was about one-eighth the size of New York City’s Central Park.)
The wives show up now and again in The Woman King, seated and standing in a cloud of regal hauteur. They’re lavishly coiffed and luxuriously dressed, and, for the most part, passive, as inert and prettily posed as dolls waiting for someone to play with them. That would be King Ghezo, a young monarch amusingly played by John Boyega, who gives the character the nonchalant imperiousness of a very important person who doesn’t seem to do much other than the most essential thing: hold power. If Ghezo wears the crown lightly, it’s only because others do his hard, dirty, sometimes murderous work.
It’s the women warriors who do much of the toughest work and who, of course, are the main attractions, which Prince-Bythewood announces at once. So, after a bit of quick, dutiful place-setting — it’s 1823 — the movie takes flight with a showy battle, a grab-you-by-thethroat entrance that gets the story going and blood flowing, yours included. Led by the battle-scarred General Nanisca (Viola Davis), the women soldiers, their bodies oiled to a high gleam, emerge like hallucinations that Prince-Bythewood makes palpably real. Suddenly, the screen fills with intense movement and by turns soaring and falling bodies.
The action scenes are visceral, and more or less rooted in the laws of physics. Even during the darkest of night, Prince-Bythewood anchors you both in the battlefield and the ensuing chaos of the fight, which tethers you visually and, by extension, strengthens the movie’s realism. Put differently, she puts you right on the ground so that you can watch these women fly. They do just that, not with superhero capes and fairy-tale enchantments, but with swords, javelins, twirling ropes and an occasional gun — as well as long, razored fingernails that scoop out enemy eyes, and thighs that crack men like walnuts.
The women are their own greatest weapons, and among everything else it addresses, The Woman King is about strong, dynamic black women, their souls, minds and bodies. Prince-Bythewood frames these warriors, with their gradations of skin tones, lovingly and attentively. (The cinematographer is Polly Morgan.) You don’t need to be a scholar of old Hollywood, which divided black performers in hierarchies of colour, typecasting darker actors in servant roles, to grasp the greater implications of Prince-Bythewood foregrounding women such as Davis, Sheila Atim and Lashana Lynch — it’s galvanising.
The overstuffed story oscillates between intimate, sometimes soppy drama and world-shaking events, most profoundly in terms of the slave trade. That the Dahomey traffic in other people complicates the triumphalism of a movie that celebrates women’s power, a complexity the story never satisfyingly engages. For the most part, the filmmakers — the script is by Dana Stevens, from a story by her and Maria Bello — navigate the political and moral thickets through Nanisca’s personal qualms about the trade, which she voices to the king, arguing that he can maintain his power more benignly.
Nanisca’s hopes and Dahomey’s future are tangled up with the schemes of the kingdom’s principal rival, the Oyo Empire (Jimmy Odukoya plays its swaggering leader), which also sells other human beings, including to the insatiable Europeans. Accurately portrayed or not, the images of the Oyo, who wear turbans wrapped around their heads and sweep in on horses, startlingly evokes the Janjaweed, the mounted militiamen who beginning in the early 2000s ravaged western Sudan. The visual connection to these forces both adds to the movie’s overall sense of the past and bridges the horrors of 19th-century Africa with those of the continent’s postcolonial conflagrations.
THE TALE IS ROOTED IN THE WOMEN WARRIORS OF DAHOMEY... THOUGHT TO HAVE EMERGED IN THE 17TH CENTURY
Even as the script falters, that history and Prince-Bythewood’s direction imbue The Woman King with an intensity that is manifest in every fight and in the clenched faces and straining muscles of the warriors.
The film drags here and there, weighted down principally by a subplot that grows more unpersuasive with each scene and involves an unruly young woman, Nawi (an appealing Thuso Mbedu), who is dumped at the palace by her family.
It’s disappointing that the script isn’t always up to its singular source material and Prince-Bythewood’s sure, steady direction. Certainly, if the writing were more nuanced and less bogged down by contemporary ideas about women’s roles — at one point, the movie shifts into a trauma-driven maternal melodrama — Davis would have far more to do than glower or dissolve in tears. She’s good at both, and she gives the role the steeliness it requires, but the character isn’t intricately detailed even if, when Nanisca raises her sword and rallies her women, you feel in your bones what is at stake in this fight.