QUEEN OF KATWE BOOK MOVIE
Nyong’o and Oyelowo are wonderful in their roles, and they generously share the screen with the children, whose thrill at being in a movie is truly infectious. Ethan Nazario Lubega is a hoot as Benjamin, a diminutive Pioneer who does not let his stature prevent him from defeating a well-heeled schoolboy. The mother-daughter scenes challenge the eye ducts, while the charming cast of mostly non-professional children supply the grin quotient. She complains to Robert that her daughter has come back with a swollen head after winning a match, but dresses up in her best dress and flirts with an old associate to get her hands on money for extra paraffin so that Phiona can read her chess books at night. Harriet wants the best for Phiona, but she worries ever so often about her steady progress. Phiona’s ascent to prodigy status is no cakewalk, and her mother emerges both as lodestar and conscience keeper. In a moving sequence, Robert checks in on his wards the night before the game to find that all of them have chosen to sleep on the floor rather than the bunk beds. The post-colonial elite that enjoys the lingering benefits of British rule (Uganda gained independence as late as 1962) is present in their clean-pressed uniforms and sense of entitlement at the school that Phiona and other chess club members – dubbed the “Pioneers” by Robert – enter in awe and embarrassment for the first major tournament of their lives. But she is quickly fascinated by the movement of black and white on a provisional board and the information that chess is the only game in which the queen may be toppled by a humble pawn. When Phiona wanders into the oasis of cleanliness and nourishment that Robert has created in Katwe, she is initially here for the serving of porridge. Phiona’s hardscrabble early years run parallel to the heroic efforts of Robert Katende (David Oyelowo) to teach chess to slum children through the government-funded Sports Outreach Institute.
Yet, her doughty mother Harriet (Lupita Nyong’o) wants to make sure that Phiona does not become anything like the wayward older daughter, Night. Phiona has been forced to drop out of school and is selling maize and lugging water for her impoverished family in the Katwe slum in the Ugandan capital Kampala.
Mutesi is now around 20 (her birth year is unclear), and she appears in the end credits alongside Madina Nalwanga, who beautifully plays her younger self. Directed by Mira Nair and based on a screenplay by William Wheeler that draws from Crothers’s book, Queen of Katwe is a stirring account of human resilience that survives its saturated and sun-flooded look, its cheery tone and the bumper-sticker dialogue. Mutesi’s remarkable talent inspired the biography The Queen of Katwe: A Story of Life, Chess, and One Extraordinary Girl's Dream of Becoming a Grandmaster by Tim Crothers, which has been adapted as the biopic Queen of Katwe. It’s not every day that a barely literate girl emerges from a slum to become a national chess champion even before she has reached voting age. Phiona Mutesi’s life was begging to be made into a movie. Author’s lament: Why Amazon closing down Westland feels like we’re living in a Mohsin Hamid novel.
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