The Woman King

We may have lost another great director of small, character-driven dramas to the blockbuster. After launching her career with the terrific Love & Basketball, The Secret Life of Bees, and Beyond the Lights, Gina Prince-Bythewood made the disappointing superhero action flick The Old Guard in 2020. That film was successful on Netflix, whatever that means, so now she's back with a far more substantial, far more distinctive action picture, which is justly getting a proper theatrical release. 

The Woman King is a historical epic starring Viola Davis as a general of the Agojie. This all-female warrior unit protected the Dahomey kingdom of West Africa for thousands of years between the 17th and 19th centuries. Davis’s General Nanisca serves and advises King Ghezo (John Boyega), leads battles against rival tribes, and trains the next generation of Agojie to fight a war instigated by slavers from the neighbouring Oyo Empire. Within this historical landscape, writers Maria Bello and Dana Stevens weave a fictional narrative about a headstrong girl named Nawi (Thuso Mbedu) who is offered to the king after refusing to marry the various old and violent men her adopted parents arrange for her. She finds a home and identity training with the Agojie, despite her unwillingness to fully adhere to their strict customs and the antagonistic relationship she develops with Nanisca.

The beats of the plot and its various subplots are predictable but still fully engaging because the characters are so vibrant and so unusual for a Hollywood blockbuster. Davis has certainly bulked up to play this role, but she looks nothing like a gym-sculpted LA actress. General Nanisca kicks ass in this movie but she's no superhuman entity. She carries herself like a battle-scarred, word-weary middle-aged warrior. She may be able to leap and kick and kill more nimbly than combatants half her age, but walking and sitting look painful for this hero. Nanisca looks remotely comfortable only when she's in a bath. She leads an army of badass fighters including Lashana Lynch as the principal combat trainer of the new Agojie, and Sheila Atim as a kind of consigliere to Nanisca. Apart from the few white slave traders and Nawi's underdeveloped love interest (Jordan Bolger)—the son of a Portugees man and an enslaved Dahomean woman—the cast is entirely comprised of dark-skinned actors and actresses who all look convincingly West African.

It's astonishing how rare a sight this still is in Hollywood movies, even when they are telling stories about the Atlantic slave trade. No doubt this lack of representation stems from the fact that most commercial movies about slavery are aimed at White audiences and there's the fear that we might not be able to tell the difference between the characters if they "all look the same." Also, throughout the history of American cinema, there has been the issue of White directors of photography finding it difficult to expose for dark pingmentation—something that changed surprisingly little even after more African-Americans became cinematographers and once digital photography enabled a near limitless latitude of exposure. But no such issues factor in here. Cinematographer Polly Morgan (The Intervention, Lucy in the Sky, A Quiet Place Part II) captures striking images of these characters fighting, dancing, standing at attention, and engaging in intense negotiations and playful conversations. Sometimes they are glistening with sweat in the moonlit darkness, sometimes they are bathed in the warm light of the desert sun. Their fierce determination is always visible in their eyes, especially those of General Nanisca, who never seems to blink and always seems to be holding something back.

Nanisca is a fictional character, but she embodies the historical truth of the Agojie's advocacy for abandoning all participation in the Atlantic slave trade. The Dahomey kingdom's wealth and power depended on slavery for centuries, though, unlike others, they did not sell their own people. These historical points are well conveyed in the sparse dialogue scenes between Nanisca and King Ghezo. One of the many things that set this film apart from most contemporary action releases (and classic historical epics, for that matter) is how little it relies on spoken exposition. It's a relief to see a modern film do its world-building and make its political points without endless, unnecessary speeches and forced dialogue.

Prince-Bythewood's background in sports lends an assured, muscular physicality to the direction in most of her pictures. There is a lot of impressive choreography in The Woman King, though the large-scale fight sequences often frustrate. The editing by Terilyn A. Shropshire (who cut all of this director's features as well as Kasi Lemmons’s early work like Eve's Bayou, The Caveman's Valentine, and Black Nativity) seems resigned to the standard modern blockbuster style in which everything happens too rapidly to fully experience what's going on from shot to shot. I'm not sure how much of this quick-cutting is done to ensure a PG-13 rating, but I wish we could linger on events in the fight sequences just a tad longer. Still, you get fully swept up in the battles of these warrior women and invested in the outcome of their stories. If Gina Prince-Bythewood is gonna focus on action blockbusters for the foreseeable future, let's hope they are all as original and exciting as The Woman King.

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