‘United Kingdom’ a real-life romance that works on film
How rare is a requited love story with international repercussions — especially a true one, involving caste or race? Not so rare in England, it seems. A decade after Edward VIII abdicated his throne to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson, along came Seretse Khama and Ruth Williams. He is an African prince studying law in London. She is a lowly clerk at Lloyd’s, the giant insurance company. When they meet at a dance, their mutual attraction is instant. When he proposes marriage, she instantly accepts.
Seretse (David Oyelowo) is, in fact, the legitimate king-in-waiting of Bechuanaland, nowadays known as Botswana. Ruth (Rosamund Pike) soon learns that her prince is charming, but not powerful: His landlocked country is huge (about the size of France), but 70 percent of it is desert, it has less than 10 miles of paved roads, and its quarter-million poor people suffer from malaria and kwashiorkor.
Guess who’s coming to dinner in the palace? A white woman! There’s a big-time backlash to the marriage by all: Seretse's family and tribal elders are against it for obvious cultural reasons. Britain’s weak-kneed Labour Party government opposes it to appease its ally South Africa, whose apartheid policy will otherwise call for withdrawal from the commonwealth. Even Winston Churchill is among the villains.
The British Bechuanaland Protectorate was a complex colonial creation designed (1) to avoid the territory’s falling into German hands and (2) to protect British mining interests’ potentially huge profits from diamonds — a girl’s and an imperialist’s best friend.
Though “UK’s” London-born director Amma Asante (“Belle,” 2013) is no great stylist, and Guy Hibbert’s sentimental screenplay is no great literary achievement, their basic storytelling is adept, and the film’s English and African period production design and cinematography are lovely, if low-budget. We’re told that Botswanans were invited to be extras and that, on the first day of filming, some 3,000 showed up. But the less-thanimpressive crowd scenes suggest that only 100 or so made the cut.
More important is Mr. Oyelowo (pronounced “oh-YELLOW-oh”), the classically trained and first black actor to play the title role in all three parts of “Henry VI” for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Also starred as Martin Luther King Jr. in ”Selma" (2014). Forthcoming costar of “Nina,” the Simone biopic. He is wonderfully naturalistic here, as always. And his real-life
wife Jessica is terrific as the highly tweezed British Lady Lilly Channing.
Mr. Oyelowo and Ms. Pike (“Gone Girl,” 2014; “An Education,” 2009) have a tender and convincing chemistry, portraying their relationship with a sincerity that’s nothing short of idyllic, which it seems to have been in real life. Equally effective and evidently true to reality are their smug British foils, notably Jack Davenport (son of Nigel) as Sir Alistair Canning, who tries to strongarm our hero into abdication or, failing that, into banishment from his country.
Epilogue or “spoiler”? I think the former, to tell you: Seretse Khama bec am e the leader of Botswana’s successful 1966 independence movement and its first elected president. Twice re-elected, he presided over that rare African success story — a stable representative government with rapid economic and social progress — and its presidency passed democratically in 2008 to his son, Ian Khama.
From the start, we pretty much see where this story is going: Love conquers all. Andrew Lloyd Webber even thought about making it into a musical. (“Don’t Cry for Me, Bechuanaland”?) At least we were spared that.