Gina Prince-Bythewood’s account of Dahomey’s all-female regiment is handsomely built, hard-hitting in its fights and carried by Viola Davis and Lashana Lynch. The script keeps tidying the history and the romance to make things easier, and the film is smaller for it.
The Woman King is set in the West African kingdom of Dahomey in 1823, and it is about the Agojie, a regiment of women who fought for its kings. Nanisca (Viola Davis) is their general, scarred, unsmiling and aware she is near the end of her usefulness. Nawi (Thuso Mbedu) is a girl dropped at the palace gate by a father who has failed to marry her off. Between them stands Izogie (Lashana Lynch), who trains the recruits and enjoys it. Gina Prince-Bythewood, who made Love & Basketball and The Old Guard, directs it as an old-fashioned war film with a training camp in the middle, and for most of its 135 minutes it is a good one. It is let down by a script that keeps making things easier than they were.
It opens in tall grass at night. An Oyo raiding party sits around its fires with the villagers it has taken, and the grass rises. Polly Morgan shoots the raid in low firelight, the Agojie’s dark tunics nearly black against it, and Terilyn A. Shropshire cuts on the blows rather than around them, so you see the machete land. We sat up. There is no music for the first stretch, only breath and metal, and when Terence Blanchard’s drums come in the film has already told you what it is.
Davis plays Nanisca as a woman who has spent years not talking about something, and Prince-Bythewood lets the camera stay on her while she does not talk about it. The performance is mostly stillness and the occasional flinch, and it is the reason the melodrama later on does not fall over. Lynch is the best thing in the film. Izogie drinks, jokes, corrects Nawi’s footwork with a stick and kills people, and Lynch makes all of that one person without visible effort. Mbedu, who has to grow up in front of us, is stubborn and quick and never merely plucky. Sheila Atim, as Nanisca’s confidante Amenza, does a good deal with few lines. John Boyega’s King Ghezo is a young man enjoying a throne he has only just taken, and Boyega plays the vanity and the intelligence at the same time.
Gersha Phillips’s costumes are the film’s strongest evidence that it knows where it is: the regiment’s tunics are cut for running, and the palace women’s wrappers and beads mark rank without a line of dialogue. Akin McKenzie’s palace is mud walls, carved doors and courtyards of red earth, and it looks lived in rather than displayed. The training scenes, with recruits hauling themselves over thorn walls and fighting each other in the dust, are the heart of the middle hour. We enjoyed them more than most of the battles that follow.
Dana Stevens’s script, from a story by Stevens and Maria Bello, keeps reaching for the tidiest option. Nawi is given a romance with Malik (Jordan Bolger), a half-Dahomean man who arrives at Ouidah with the Portuguese slaver Santo Ferreira (Hero Fiennes Tiffin), and it plays like a scene borrowed from another film that had more time for it. The Oyo general Oba Ade (Jimmy Odukoya) is a sneer on a horse. The plotting relies more than once on the right person being in the right place with the right piece of knowledge. We noticed each time, and the film sailed on.
Then there is the history. Dahomey sold captives to European traders, and the film knows it: Nanisca spends the first act urging Ghezo to trade palm oil instead. But the story is arranged so that the Oyo do the selling and Dahomey does the resisting, and that arrangement flatters its heroes more than the record does. Some critics have found this fatal. We did not; a war film in which the good side is entirely good is the genre’s oldest habit, and Prince-Bythewood at least puts the argument on screen. It does leave the film smaller than it wants to be, a rousing story told where a harder one was available.
The last act, which we will not describe, swaps the film’s questions for a siege, and Shropshire cuts the big battle cleanly enough that you always know where Nanisca is. Against the run of films about soldiers drilled and then sent into the field, it sits comfortably: better acted than most, better dressed than nearly all, and no braver in its story than the average. Watch it for Lynch, for Davis’s face, and for the first ten minutes, which are as good as anything Prince-Bythewood has shot.
