Normally, I see big releases the weekend they come out, and I saw the trailer for Queen & Slim plenty of times before the movie came out. Why did I wait to see this one? Bad weather. I figured I would have time to catch up eventually, and now that I am on my Christmas break, well, here we are.
Queen & Slim tells the story of a young African American couple on a first date. Neither are given names for most of the movie, but they aren’t really referred to as “Queen” or “Slim” outside the title as near as I can recall.
Granted, the trailers showed a character calling the pair the “black Bonnie and Clyde,” and that’s a somewhat decent explanation for who they are. Essentially, after an awkward first date over dinner, Slim (Daniel Kaluuya) gets pulled over by a cop. Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith) is an attorney and goes out to confront the cop while Slim is being arrested for no clear reason. A scuffle breaks out, shots are fired, and the cop is dead. The only real choice the pair has is to make a run for it or stay behind to be arrested for killing a cop, a prospect both know isn’t going to go well for them. They opt to run.
The movie’s plotline is, all things being equal, not all that new. The Bonnie and Clyde comparison isn’t a particularly terrible comparison. True, Queen & Slim‘s overall tone is nowhere near Bonnie and Clyde‘s breezy good time. Queen and Slim are running for their lives, not robbing banks for the hell of it while hanging out with their gang. If anything, the 60s counterculture is reflected a bit in Bonnie and Clyde the same way present day movements like Black Lives Matter reflects on Queen & Slim. As such, Queen & Slim has a much more anxious tone to it, as befitting the circumstances of the story.
In point of fact, at least one or two of the pair’s escape from law enforcement had a few folks in my screening audibly commenting on the stupidity of the characters.
But the real attraction here is the slow romance built between Queen and Slim. When we first meet them, Queen is a standoffish woman who outright says she prefers solitude. A lawyer by profession, she sees right and wrong as a matter of legality, and she knows how the law works well enough to make some tough decisions early on to keep them ahead of the police as the movie starts.
As for Slim, he’s a more community-minded man, not so much interested in perfection but just doing right by his people. The fact that he killed anyone weighs heavily on him early in the movie, but his essential goodness is underlined by his religious faith, something he doesn’t share with Queen who seems to be something of an atheist. What he does for a living is never quite spelled out, but at his core, it’s demonstrable that he cares for those close to him.
As such, we see the pair argue, bicker, and gradually fall for each other even as their actions are largely misunderstood by the larger world. The media seems to reflect what the cops say, the cops want to bring in some cop killers, and a lot of other people they meet think the pair did what they did as some kind of political statement and not some spur-of-the-moment act of self defense. The emotional bond between the characters and the strong performances of both Kaluuya and Turner-Smith make the movie what it is. As they both start to conform to each other, it seems right somehow.
And that’s more of what this movie is. It isn’t so much about a couple fleeing from the authorities as it is a couple learning to love each other. Go for that. The rest is fine, but the romance is far, far better.
Grade: B+
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