Queen & Slim (Melina Matsoukas, 2019)

"Isn't this kind of a black Thelma & Louise?" my wife Jen asked as we were about halfway through Queen & Slim, and I couldn't really refute the idea. Like that overrated "feminist" outlaw film, Queen & Slim could capture the Zeitgeist by trading on one of the most vital social issues facing America today: police violence against African-Americans. But the film doesn't have a great deal to say about that particular issue, at least not once it hits the road for its reverse-Underground-Railroad attempted flight to freedom.

After an awkward Tinder date, Angela (Jodie Turner-Smith), an attorney, and Earnest (Daniel Kaluuya), a middle-class Christian, are pulled over by a racist cop. He shoots Angela in the leg, which prompts Earnest to tackle him, and in the altercation he accidentally kills the officer. On Angela's advice, they flee. The rest of the film is essentially a road movie, with the couple becoming closer as time wears on, and Matsoukas and screenwriter Lena Waithe making the point that nearly everywhere they go, "Queen" and "Slim" are helped by the black community, who see them both as victims of circumstance and as symbols of possible justice. If these two "outlaws" can somehow survive, it would be inspiring, a rare win for the good guys.

[SPOILERS FOLLOW]

This does not happen, and it ultimately poses the question of what Queen & Slim hopes to accomplish as a cultural fiction. On the one hand, it's a very pedestrian film that adheres to nearly every convention of the road movie. Its narrative beats are fairly predictable, and when Matsoukas and Waithe go off-script, the results are rather disastrous. A sequence that cross-cuts between Angela and Earnest having sex and a street riot is wholly ill-advised, the sort of thing that Lee Daniels would reject as tasteless hackwork. But on the other hand, there is a clear attempt at myth-making that gives Queen & Slim its underlying charge. This is, in some ways, a story we have not seen before. Why does fiction need to follow the dictates of the white man's Law?

This essay by Brooke C. Obie articulates the problem better than I can. (Thanks to Sarah-Tai Black for drawing my attention to it.) This isn't just a question of wanting a more satisfying ending to an exciting police chase. It's about the power of art to imagine resistance at a time when it seems less and less possible. How can we keep our eyes on the prize when we've forgotten what triumph even looks like?