Editor’s Note: After a few years working remotely, Nick Johnston is back in Canada all week covering the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. We’re all very excited! Read through our continuing coverage of TIFF 2022, check out our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of this year and past festivals.
So here’s some late-breaking news for you: I’m not a historian. Shocking, I know, but I just wanted to get that out of the way before folks ask me why I don’t delve into the historical accuracy of something like Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King, a Hollywood “epic” set in the Kingdom of Dahomey, which once boasted an all-woman fighting force much like the ones glimpsed, albeit on a fictional basis, in other popular blockbuster films. There’s plenty of evidence that the claims that this film makes — that Dahomey wound up fighting for an end to the slave trade and was as equitable and fair as they’re made out to be on screen — are about as legit as Zack Snyder reimagining the 300 Spartans who died fighting the Persians at Thermopolye as Bush-era defenders of “freedom” and “democracy.” But to bog this entire review down in the muck of those questions would let the rest of this movie off of the hook, and also ignore that this is just what Hollywood and, to a lesser extent, all of myth-making narrative storytelling does: Repurposing the facts of history for uneven and misleading narrative ends, in a process that isn’t just about “revisionism” as much as it is, you know, entertainment. There are so many more qualified people who can tear this movie to shreds on those grounds, but the ones I’m (relatively) qualified for are its quality as a movie, and boy, it’s hard to understate how crushingly mediocre The Woman King is even comparison to its mid-budget historical epic kin.
It’s certainly got a cool enough premise and solid enough production design to compliment it: Prince-Bythewood’s team does good work with bringing the setting — 19th-century Africa — to life through the sets and costuming, and her cast is well-suited to the job at hand. After all, you’ve essentially handed Viola Davis her chance to be a hybrid of George C. Scott’s Patton and Conan the Barbarian. As such, she’s fierce and intense as Nanisca, the leader of the Agojie, a fighting force of badass women sworn to serve their king in the most ferocious ways possible, being the tip of his spear in all of the regional conflicts that threaten his throne. Chief among them is the Oyo Empire, who Dahomey has been serving as tributary for generations, and whose demands are growing more pernicious by the day. Its into this environment that Nawi (Thuso Mbedu), a new recruit thrown into service for the king by her father after she’s scorned each one of her arranged suitors, enters the picture. She’s let into the gated walls of the palace, where the warriors train in an area free of all men (with an exception for Eunichs), and become masters of the arts of war. Nawi takes to the training like a math major takes to Dungeons and Dragons, and soon enough she finds herself marching alongside Nanisca and her sisters-in-arms, including Izogie (Lashana Lynch), who is basically the Han Solo type of jocular badass, into open warfare with the Oyo. All the while, a pair of Brazilian traders — one white, one half-black — emerge on to the scene, with the latter witnessing firsthand the cruelty of the slave trade and the glory of the Agojie in battle, and who falls in love with Nawi, even though she’s forbidden from doing so. But deeper ties bond Nawi and Nanisca, and lie at the root of her hatred for the Oyo who she swears to vanquish at whatever cost.
Again, it’s all rather formulaic, with the novelty of the setting (at least as it pertains to Hollywood big-budget action epics) only doing so much to alleviate Prince-Bythewood’s intense adherence to the rules of the form. As cool as some of those twists to the recipe are — the explanation behind Nawi’s “mark of the devil,” a scar on her back that holds the secret to her abilities, feels as if it were pulled from African folklore itself, and it’s fascinating to see in practice, though it’s in service of a plot element that’s slowly starting to fall out of fashion. But the problems start to roll in with the fight sequences, the construction of which continues to elude the director after Harriet and The Old Guard, made even worse by tripling the scale. It’s a fusion of inert (partially thanks to the PG-13 rating, and the film gets exciting when it starts to brush up against that boundary, like when Davis unrolls a bag of freshly-cut heads in front of her enemies like a grocer tumbling over a bag of lettuce) and incomprehensible, with the same lack of coherence that sank the fights in Old Guard just writ large across the battlefields. You just keep waiting for an “oomph” that never quite comes, some sort of stirring spectacle that would make you recall those grand adventures you’d grew up watching. And as the film drags on, it starts to recall the other problems that those films had: There’s no good stopping point, and the film ends at least three or four times before the credits begin to roll. Dana Stevens’ screenplay (with a “Story By” credit for… Maria Bello?) desperately wants to wrap things up in an acceptable way, but therein lies the rub: not all historical fables can cleanly come together.
This is where the history comes in: The Woman King does not want to be a downer in the slightest, and like other historical narratives sanitized for mainstream consumption, a little bit of moral shading might have helped. Acknowledging the failure of Dahomey’s attempts (if they existed) to extricate itself from the slave trade would have been an interesting way to celebrate the culture without being afraid that any criticism might indict it and spirit away any wonder or awe that it can inspire. I wonder if, even if everything I didn’t quite care for remained in The Woman King, if it would have been better had Prince-Bythewood committed more to presenting the setting in a less idealistic way. Viola Davis is fierce as fuck, but there’s got to be a better middle ground of the conflicts within her (fictional!) character than the one reached here, where her abolitionist ideas are occasionally mentioned and shown, once or twice (she’d prefer that the Kingdom would make its money from Palm Oil, rather than trading their captives), but are never adequately addressed for her to play the role she does in the film’s finale. If you’re going to fictionalize these things, why not just commit to them, history books be damned? The Woman King doesn’t need to be “better” at historiography or cultural awareness than its equally-susceptible peers, but if it’s going to fall into the same old traps that every single Hollywood film rooted in a similar sensibility, it might as well be as entertaining and/or compelling.