The Woman King (2022); God's Country (2022)
From different eras and continents, two Black women who will not be suppressed
The Woman King (2022)
Viola Davis as general Nanisca, leader of the fierce Agojie in The Woman King
From almost every angle, The Woman King is deeply, enduringly impressive. And savvy. It’s not monumental like Ben-Hur (1959) or Spartacus (1960) or Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and wisely doesn’t aspire to be.
To bring a whole continent into our imaginations, it focuses on the Kingdom of Dahomey, which reached its apex in West Africa from the 18th to the 19th century. Dahomey’s 1823 war with the rival Oyo Empire forms the crux of the movie’s storyline.
Let’s be clear. Both the Kingdom and the Empire were in rivalry over the slave trade, which they both hugely profited from. If the movie features Dahomean courage in fighting off and putting down the larger Oyo Empire, it still leaves us to ask what Dahomey was fighting for.
Wasn’t that in fact its own continued profiting in selling fellow Africans? Yes, profoundly. But the movie would have us believe that slave trading wasn’t Dahomey’s most fervent wish, certainly never an ideal.
At one point the woman at the heart of the story, the warrior general Nanisca (Viola Davis), wonders whether the Kingdom could profit from the sale of palm oil rather than human beings. (In historical fact, the Kingdom did sell palm oil, but it wasn’t nearly as profitable as the slave trade).
Obviously, that’s been put into the script to show us that Dahomeans understood their entire continent was under threat, that all African bodies were subject to capture and bondage.
So, the most enlivening political question of the day was, which African tribe or region would white slavers from Europe or America align with – or seek to conquer – next?
That’s the unsettled subtext churning underneath The Woman King. It isn’t about which African army is braver, more cunning or more likely to be victorious. It’s mostly about how women, independent of men, can call forth their own power, drawing on discipline, skilled hand-to-hand combat and fire in the belly.
That’s the celebrated achievement, and director Gina Prince-Bythewood keeps the scale exactly right to tell that particular story. She’s not trying to echo or outdo Hollywood gigantism.
For this story, of a woman trying to advance the cause of Africans and African women, Prince-Bythewood keeps everything within recognizable human dimensions, showing us people anyone in the audience can relate to.
Foremost is Nanisca, who forges a force of women warriors, the Agojie, equal in stealth and bravado to any legion of fighting men. Her steely, heartless fervor at waging war inspires and drives the women she commands.
They comprise a distinct, varied group, nicely shaded and individualized by screenwriters Dana Stevens and Maria Bello. Izogie (Lashana Lynch), makes loyalty to her commander her north star. Amenza (Sheila Atim), Nanisca’s second in command and chief adviser, speaks harsh truths to the woman she admires.
Most anxiously we watch as Nawi (Thuso Mbedu), a frightened, awkward young recruit, stiffens her will to fight, and even more importantly, to stand on her own.
Valiant and resourceful as they all become, these women are subject to the will of King Ghezo (John Boyega), who insists that his female fighting force remain in service to his central aim, to best the Oyo. The white slavers’ scheming is a distraction he won’t be lulled by.
What I found most moving were the instances of the women helping each other through crises. Men, after all, aren’t entirely rooting for them, and men from other tribes outright mock them.
Thuso Mbedu, Lashana Lynch and Sheila Atim become tenacious warriors in The Woman King
All they have is each other. This solidarity is part of what powers the movie’s dance sequences, some of them representing all members of the Kingdom. The under-driving drums and percussive, tightly rhythmed dancing are hypnotic, and, honestly, every dance sequence felt slightly truncated to me. I wanted them all to go on longer.
Nanisca may be Viola Davis’ best performance, in a career full of knockouts. She has all the requisite strength, but is most interesting in Nansica’s more vulnerable moments, when she has to confront buried secrets from her past, and admit that killing and loving need somehow to be reconciled, or what does the killing accomplish?
It’s a heartfelt portrait of a woman whose personal power can also be her most profound shortcoming. But can Nanisca ever wield a sword! The battle sequences she leads are thrillingly staged.
The movie is near epic in its reach, the way it suggests historical forces at work that are even vaster than the ones we’re seeing on screen. It’s a hymn to Africa’s resistance to white encroachment, yet it’s diligent enough to frankly treat Africans warring against each other.
It throws up a cry, no, a howl, against slavery, of course, but also a stark warning about invasion, the potential systematic erasure of a people and a culture. It feels like nearly every character, beneath the ululated battle cries, can sense dissolution coming.
This is a brand-new, absolutely unique undertaking: a solidly budgeted American movie about corrosive colonial Black African experience. It can speak to, and enlighten, people worldwide. And leave Africa, with all her contradictions, singing in their blood.
Thandiew Newton as Sandra, a woman threatened and alone in chilly God’s Country
God’s Country (2022)
Thandiew Newton has a transfixing beauty that the camera never depletes, can’t use up. She glows right through the screen into your mind. In God’s Country she plays Sandra Guidry, a denizen of New Orleans who finds herself, after the death of her mother, alone in a deep cold winter within a vast, sparsely populated region of the Western U.S. (The movie was shot entirely in Montana.)
In the opening passages, with majestic views of forbidding, snow-covered mountains, nothing holds our eyes as intently as Sandra’s hauntingly unreadable face, luminous and enigmatic at the same time.
Newton plays these scenes with restraint and ease. There’s something almost sculptural about her acting. She seems to carve out her presence directly onto the screen, making her own stamp on the character right alongside the cinematographer’s.
And along with the forbidding landscape she keeps something in reserve we can’t put our finger on. Newton is in every scene, and each scene seems to cry out for her.
We sense Sandra’s isolation yet feel her competence, too, as she chops wood and confidently takes runs in the wilderness, alone yet somehow safe. She seems comfortably situated in the chilly, forlorn landscape.
Her handsome, isolated two-story wooden frame house feels like a home, and she has a warm, playful relationship with her lively, beautiful black dog.
Intruders show up. First, as trespassers, parking their red pickup on her property before climbing into the wilderness to hunt. She hot wires the truck and drives it to the edge of her land, leaving a note on the windshield, I’d prefer you didn’t park here.
Sandra is a former New Orleans policewoman scarred by the treatment meted out to Blacks in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. That’s when she quit the force. Since then, she’s furthered her education and changed professions. She’s now a professor at the local university.
But she hasn’t lost her beat cop’s alertness to troublemakers, and when they show up in person, two brothers, Nathan and Samuel (Joris Jarsky and Jefferson White), she stonily warns them off her land. They hurl their contempt right back in her face.
An underbelly of the region surfaces, a red state suspicion of outsiders, particularly a mixed-race woman. When the intruders menacingly threaten Sandra, she seeks the help of the local sheriff (Jeremy Bobb), who advises her he has no backup in policing an enormous chunk of the state. He orders the intruders to back off, but he can’t stop them from menacing Sandra.
Sheriff Wolf (Jeremy Bobb) and Sandra (Thandiew Newton) ally uneasily in God’s Country
With her home and safety in peril, Sandra sifts through her past. Her beloved mother, a devout Christian, has recently died in this cold state where, devoted as she was to her daughter, she never wanted to move to.
In one of the movie’s most entrancing scenes, Sandra, remembering her mother’s Bible-quoting, follows one of the rural natives into a church service. He sits beside her, and they bond over what faith has meant to them and wonder how much comfort it’s actually provided.
The director, Julian Higgins, in his feature debut, handles these unlikely juxtapositions deftly. But he and his co-screenwriter, Shaye Ogbonna, also drop into their plot the lack of diversity in the university department where Sandra teaches, and they don’t stop there. They also load on an incident of sexual harassment against an indigenous young woman.
These strands don’t seem out of place, but they feel slightly incidental to Sandra’s personal story and her confrontation with armed, menacing white men who don’t like her because of the color of her skin.
When they kill Sandra’s beloved dog, the warfare between progressive ideals and hard-bitten backwardness is on. How far each side is willing to go sets up the final showdown.
What keeps us engrossed is Higgins’ carefully selective direction and Andrew Wheeler’s stately cinematography, consistently making us feel frigid with both cold and danger. They never overpack the screen with fright, and don’t turn Sandra’s conflicting feelings into melodrama. Justin LaForge’s sharp editing keeps us squarely in each moment.
Sandra remains, even in a frozen, bewildering landscape, her own woman. We get just enough of her backstory as a light-brown-skinned woman from Louisiana, where lots of people looked just like her, transitioned to a world where her very face can feel to many like a challenge.
In their minds, she’s an intruder. The movie’s title isn’t mere bombast. Religious faith is tested, and the American flag is carefully juxtaposed to – or is it aligned with? – Christianity. That’s precisely the question the writers are raising.
These threads aren’t neatly tied together and can come across as grafted onto Sandra’s story, not arising from it. But I’d rather see a script that tries to do too much than too little. The movie is confident enough to pit Sandra, a steely progressive, against MAGA-inspired orneriness. When one side goes too far, the other can’t resist striking back.
The beleaguered beauty of Newton’s face in the final shot tells you not nearly as much as you’d like to know, but it’s all you or she can draw from that chilling moment. You really have to write your own ending to this movie’s countercurrents of political truth and violence.
But you do end up knowing how one woman reaches the point where she won’t take disrespect any longer. Make of her stance what you will. You won’t be able to forget Newton’s mesmerizing performance.