Off and running
Allegory for #BlackLivesMatter is also an exciting action movie with a little romance
When you watch movies for a living, you get used to all the little tricks screenwriters use to hide the fact that they’re spoon-feeding you story details. “Now, as we both know ...” “I’m telling you this as your brother ...” “Well, if it isn’t ...”
Which is why I was bowled over by one tiny, lovely, blink-andmiss-it scrap of dialogue from writer Lena Waithe in Queen & Slim. An unnamed couple — let’s call them Slim and Queen — are on a first date. She says she’s had a bad day. He asks why. “One of my clients got the death penalty.”
Think how much that tells us. She’s a lawyer, working defence, experienced enough to be handling capital-punishment cases, but not perfect. She’s sympathetic to her clients. There’s a whole backstory in that one line.
Her lawyerly instincts will come to the fore in the next scene, when he’s driving her home and a white cop pulls them over. Slim and Queen are black, played by Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out) and relative newcomer Jodie Turner-Smith. By the time the altercation ends, the cop is dead and the couple is on the run.
Queen & Slim is a first feature from Melina Matsoukas, whose bread and butter has been ads and music videos. But she manages the pacing of this twoplus-hour episodic story nicely: Our anti-heroes run across a sheriff who doesn’t realize who they are, an oddly sympathetic gas-station attendant outside of Nashville and a helpful relative in New Orleans. Their Cleveland-to-Florida road trip plays like a kind of reverse Underground Railroad, with the understanding that if they can make it to Cuba they might be safe.
You can watch the film as a social allegory in the age of #BlackLivesMatter — it certainly won’t mind. But it also operates on the simpler level of an exciting action flick with more than a little romance in the mix — Bonnie and Clyde if they’d been acting in self-defence. One senses that philosophical differences would have prevented the first date from leading to a second — he doesn’t believe in luck, she doesn’t believe in God. Yet over several days of travel they find common ground, in the way that couples learn to change their more annoying habits, or get used to them, or meet in the middle.
Matsoukas even creates a technique whereby we hear their thoughts as though spoken aloud — they’re becoming that close. By the end you realize that friends will accompany you on a road trip, but only soulmates will do it with cops in pursuit. The film stumbles just a little in its messaging. I lost track of how many times it tried to drive home the importance of family, and a montage juxtaposing love and hate doesn’t really work in the context of the film. Regardless, this is a self-assured feature, smart and stylish in equal measure. And as we both know — and I’m telling you this as a critic — if that isn’t a rare combination, I don’t know what is.