Queen & Slim
- A powerful love story that somehow seems both topical and timeless.
Full Disclosure: I’m not normally a big fan of road trip movies, but this movie seemed to be billed as a Bonnie and Clyde or Thelma & Louise-type film. That made it more interesting to me, especially with the added element common with the latter film that the pair are fleeing some sort of injustice. I was intrigued by the topical nature of the story, and Daniel Kaluuya has been excellent in his last few roles, so I decided to give it a try.
Review
There have been a number of movies recently that deal, in part, with police shooting unarmed black people (tragically, not as many as actual shooting incidents), from the heartbreaking Fruitvale Station, to last year’s The Hate U Give (which I really liked) and Monsters and Men (which I thought had story issues), as well as several others. Queen & Slim is another film that tries to tackle this issue, although in this case, while the character of “Queen” is shot first, it’s the cop who ends up killed in self-defence. But rather than make this the focus of the movie, it plays out more as the setting for a love story.
I love the way this movie opens. Some movies need a certain amount of set-up or backstory before the real plot begins. Queen & Slim just dives right in. We’re introduced to the pair as they’re first meeting each other, on a Tinder date that doesn’t seem to be going very well. It’s a brilliantly written and acted conversation. We learn everything we need to know about these people from this first, initial interaction.
The unsuccessful first date (Queen admits later she wouldn’t have given him a second date) leads quickly to the event that really sets the story in motion. As Slim is driving her home, and maybe still hoping he’ll get some, they get pulled over by a white cop. After asking Slim to get out of the car, the cop aggressively pulls his gun, and when Queen gets out to ask what’s going on, he shoots her in the leg. A struggle ensues and Slim ends up grabbing the officer’s gun and killing him. Believing that they won’t get a fair shake from the justice system, as two African Americans who killed a white police officer (Queen, a lawyer, had just earlier that day had a client sentenced to death), they go on the run.
Queen and Slim’s first meeting, during a Tinder date that’s filled with tension.
The rest of the movie details their run from the law, trying to form a plan, and attempting to escape to freedom (they eventually decide on trying to get to Cuba). But what it’s really about is the developing relationship between them. Many movies follow the same basic relationship timeline cribbed from romantic comedies: a couple meet, maybe they even hate each other at first, then they fall in love, then they do something stupid and break up, only to realize their mistake and get back together again with some grand gesture at the end.
This movie does things differently. Rather than a relationship tale with broad swings back and forth, Queen & Slim does a slow burn on the affection that grows between the pair. Their relationship at the beginning can probably be best described as cool indifference, mixed with slight annoyance. Through their long journey, as they’re forced to rely on each other, a trust begins to develop that naturally leads to love, and then an unbreakable bond. The Black Lives Matter-type issues that form the external plot of the movie are certainly omnipresent, particularly in the interactions with everyone the pair meet on their travels. Screenwriter Lena Waithe has said that she wrote a “very black” movie, and this is true, but the love story between Queen and Slim is really at the core of the film, and it’s done very well.
There were a few times in the film where it felt like the momentum was starting to lag, and the story verged on being repetitive, as the main characters sought refuge in new towns and from new people on their hopeful journey to freedom. For me, this is always a drawback of road trip movies. But the subtle changes in their relationship kept things on track and held my interest. There were also a few elements of the story that seemed a little underdeveloped, particularly involving some of the peripheral characters, but I’m not sure what the solution to that would have been without taking the focus off of the leads. The whole film experience was more than enough to overcome these weaknesses though, and we’re left with a story that is often powerful and memorable.
Spoilers Ahead
On the run, torching a stolen truck and getting help from Queen’s pimp-life uncle.
As alluded to above, one of the side stories that seemed underdeveloped involved a kid with whom Queen and Slim cross paths on their journey. Later, after they’ve continued on, we see him participating in a protest rally for the couple that begins to turn violent. As a black riot police officer is trying to convince the kid to leave the street, he takes out a gun and shoots the cop. We later hear that the boy was killed. This seemed to come out of nowhere. While I guess the point was to try to demonstrate how Queen and Slim’s experience was taking on a life of its own, beyond their control, the specific action of the boy didn’t really seem to come from any particular place of hurt or animus.
I kept holding out hope until near the end of the film that Queen and Slim would get away, and find some measure of peace, even though everything inside me told me that wasn’t going to happen. The story was always going to end in tragedy because that’s what stories of this kind are. The ending, when the pair are gunned down by dozens of police on a small airport runway when they don’t immediately react to commands to surrender, may at first seem unrealistic, as the couple is surrounded and unarmed, but then, we’ve seen far too many stories in real life of unarmed people being killed for this to be beyond belief. In the end, Queen and Slim die in each other’s arms, in a sense having found the companionship-until-death that they were looking for, but creating another flashpoint of injustice for the world left behind.
Queen & Slim as they’re remembered, after becoming just another cautionary tale of racial injustice.
5 Quick Hits
As far as I can remember, neither character was referred to in the movie as either Queen or Slim, so I’m not quite sure why those are the listed names of the characters or the title of the movie. I kept expecting it to be revealed in a short interaction between the two of them, like pet names for each other or something, but nope, it never was.
There was a jarringly casual depiction of domestic violence at one point in the movie. I would take issue with it but I think it served the story by illustrating how desperate the main characters were when they have to turn to Queen’s uncle for help. It also helped explain why she has trouble trusting people. Still, it was strange to see it happen in such an off-hand manner.
At one point there was a perfect juxtaposition of love and hate when the movie cut back and forth between a scene of Queen and Slim having sex, and a scene with a protest and stand-off with the police that turns violent in another state. Maybe a little on the nose, but I still thought it was well done.
It’s a crowded Oscar field but the two leads probably deserve nominations for these performances. Daniel Kaluuya is on a rapid rise, and I’ve seen most of the things he’s done since his breakthrough in a Black Mirror episode a few years ago, but I wasn’t familiar at all with Jodie Turner-Smith. Both were great.
It’s interesting to note that both Kaluuya and Turner-Smith are British (although Turner-Smith partly grew up in the US). I just thought that for a distinctly American story, the two lead actors would foreigners. Maybe there’s something unique about an outsider perspective on issues like police shootings.
