QUEEN AND SLIM
Rating: R (Nudity|Brief Drug Use, Pervasive Language, Some Strong Sexuality and Violence)
Genre: Crime, Drama, Romance
Original Language:English
Director: Melina Matsoukas
Producer: James Frey, Lena Waithe, Melina Matsoukas, Michelle Knudsen, Andrew Coles, Brad Weston, Pamela Abdy
Writer: Lena Waithe
Release Date (Theaters): Nov 27, 2019 Wide
Release Date (Streaming): Nov 27, 2019
Runtime: 2h 12m
Aspect Ratio: Scope (2.35:1)
CAST
Daniel Kaluuya as Slim
Jodie Turner-Smith as Queen
Bokeem Woodbine as Uncle Earl
Chloë Sevigny as Mrs. Shepherd
Flea as Mr. Johnny Shepherd
Sturgill Simpson as Police Officer Reed
Indya Moore as Goddess
Benito Martinez as Sheriff Edgar
Jahi Di’Allo Winston as Junior
Gralen Bryant Banks as Older Black Man
Dickson Obahor as Large Black Man
Bryant Tardy as Chubby
Thom Gossom Jr. as Slim’s Father
Melanie Halfkenny as Naomi
Plot
“Queen”, a criminal defense attorney, has an awkward dinner with her Tinder date “Slim“in an Ohio diner. He drives her home, and they are pulled over by a white police officer who searches Slim and his trunk. When Slim asks if he could hurry as it is cold outside, the officer draws his gun on him. Queen gets out confronting the officer, reaching for her phone, and he shoots her in the leg. Slim tackles the officer and a scuffle ensue, resulting in Slim grabbing the officer’s gun and shooting him dead. Taking the gun and throwing away their phones, Queen tells Slim they must go on the run, or else spend their lives in prison.
Out of gas, they flag down a passing driver, Edgar, who turns out to be a Kentucky sheriff. He receives an APB about the officer’s death and realizes Queen and Slim are the suspects, but they take his truck at gunpoint, leaving him in the trunk of Slim’s car. They pay a young boy to order them food, and he reveals that dash cam footage of their confrontation with the officer has gone viral. They accidentally strike the boy’s father with the truck, but he is supportive of their actions and they drive him to a hospital. Slim has an unsettling encounter with a gas station clerk after letting him hold the gun.
They arrive in New Orleans at the house of Queen’s estranged Uncle Earl, a pimp, and Slim proposes they escape to Cuba. After a police officer notices their truck, Earl gives them money and another car to reach Johnny Shepherd, a friend whose life he saved while serving overseas. Queen and Slim bond while dancing at a bar, where they are recognized by sympathetic locals, and stop to admire a horse by the road. Their car breaks down, forcing them to give all their money to a black mechanic, whose teenage son Junior expresses his admiration for them; Slim has Junior take their picture.
Slim calls his father, who cuts the call short; it is revealed that law enforcement were listening in, but his father refuses to cooperate. Queen takes Slim to visit the grave of her mother, who was accidentally killed by Earl during a disagreement; Queen successfully defended him in her first trial. Slim comforts Queen and they have sex in the car. At a protest in support of the fugitives, Junior is urged to leave by a compassionate black officer, whom he impulsively shoots in the face, and is himself killed.
Queen and Slim reach the home of Shepherd and his wife, who reveal that a $500,000 bounty has been placed on them, and Shepherd gives them directions to a man in Florida. A neighbor sees them arrive, and a SWAT team raids the house but fails to find them, hidden in a crawlspace under the Shepherds’ bed. The next day, they sneak out of the house through a window and Queen dislocates her shoulder, which Slim resets, but her cry alerts a black officer stationed outside. He discovers them about to flee in the Shepherds’ car, but lets them escape.
They reach the Florida address and sleep in the car, awakened in the morning by a black man with a shotgun. They follow him to his trailer where he makes a call, telling them a friend can help them escape by plane. He drives them to the tarmac and Queen and Slim walk toward a waiting plane, but a squad of police cars arrives. Joining hands, they declare their love for each other, but Queen is shot dead by an overeager officer. Ignoring police commands, Slim carries Queen’s body toward the officers and is gunned down as well.
The people Queen and Slim encountered react to news reports of their deaths; the Florida man has collected the bounty. Their real names are revealed to be Angela Johnson and Ernest Hines, and hundreds attend their funeral, viewing them as martyrs as Junior’s photo of them becomes a symbol across the country.
Theme
Police brutality
Love
Unity
Queen & Slim Review
After a first date, a young black man and woman (Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith) are involved in a routine traffic stop. Things escalate, there is a tussle and the white policeman is killed. With no other option, these relative strangers — and sudden folk heroes — make a dangerous run for it.
“Well, if it isn’t the black Bonnie and Clyde,” says tracksuited pimp Uncle Earl (Bokeem Woodbine) midway through Queen & Slim, regarding our two fugitive protagonists with more than a little scenery-chomping relish. It is the sort of line that may as well come with a turn to the camera and a wink; an irresistible, snappy marketing proposition that distils this complex, none-more-2019 project into the sort of arresting pitch that could be scrawled on to a cocktail napkin.
But scratch the surface and it has a more significant resonance. Because just as the real Bonnie and Clyde (a desperate pair of career criminals, hobbled by injuries and actually more prone to rob small grocery stores than banks) have been lost to the more seductive, romanticised 1930s legend, so too do runaways Queen and Slim (respectively, a similarly electric Jodie Turner-Smith and Daniel Kaluuya) find themselves as the baffled, scared recipients of wider public mythologising. In a film that ultimately proves to be about how the world chooses to view you — and how dangerous or powerful that can be — it’s far more than a throwaway gag.
Yes, debut feature director Melina Matsoukas delivers on the promise of a Black Lives Matter spin on Thelma & Louise – replete with stomach-knotting moments of tension, neon-bathed visual razzmatazz and exhilarating musical cues. But Queen & Slim always affords time and space to intimate, quiet moments that orient themselves around these issues of race, perception, legacy and the fledgling love between its two central characters. From a certain angle, it is merely a movie about the most traumatic, life-changing first date imaginable. And it’s all the better for it.
Written by Lena Waithe (the actor and screenwriter perhaps best-known for her Matsoukas-directed, Emmy-winning episode of Master Of None), it opens with Kaluuya and Turner-Smith’s largely unnamed Ohio natives in the midst of a decidedly lacklustre Tinder date at a bright-lit diner (“Did you pick this place because it’s all you could afford?” zings Turner-Smith’s character before Slim shoots back that, no, it’s because “it’s black-owned”).
Tackles urgent, difficult subjects with bravery, care and adrenalised genre cool.
Afterwards, in the wintry slush of an abandoned street, they are pulled over by a white cop (played by alt-country singer Sturgill Simpson) who — as tensions rise — grazes Queen with a bullet. In a powerful, transgressive twist on how these encounters usually go, Slim fires back with the dropped weapon, kills the officer and (prompted by the fact that Turner-Smith’s character is a criminal defence attorney who knows how, well, slim their chances of exoneration are) the two of them hit the road, ultimately bound for Florida and then, hopefully, Cuba.
It’s an opening that perhaps induces some dramatic whiplash. However, from there, as a viral video of the incident casts Queen and Slim as both dangerous criminals and vital avenging angels for a brutalised African-American community, the film settles into an irrepressible groove; visuals, dialogue and performances purring away like the gleaming Pontiac Catalina that Woodbine’s terrific, Louisiana-based relative reluctantly loans our heroes.
Waithe peppers her wry, almost theatrical script with tension-easing comic moments (including a Tarantino-worthy debate about whether Fat Luther Vandross is better than Skinny Luther Vandross) but also artfully reveals Queen and Slim’s divergent character traits in conversations that feel both fiercely personal and like universal disagreements between opposing sides of the modern black American psyche. Matsoukas — who brings a painterly eye and dreamlike cutting from the world of music videos — maintains a curious, agile camera, taking us from flickering juke joints to lush fields that are tended by prisoners who may as well be latter-day slaves.
But it’s perhaps the grounded, magnetic lead performances that are most important (especially as the third act throws in a few light implausibilities). Kaluuya, from the moment we see terror and pride swim across his face during that traffic stop, is extraordinarily affecting as god-fearing, slightly gawky Slim. And Turner-Smith (SyFy’s Nightflyers) matches him all the way as Queen: a proud, lonely workaholic who gradually opens herself up to the possibility of love and letting go. If that character progression sounds like the stuff of a Netflix romcom then, in truth, that is sort of the point. Queen & Slim tackles urgent, difficult subjects with bravery, care and adrenalized genre cool. But it triumphs because it shows you the personal toll beyond the politics. And how black lives brimming with potential can still turn on one fateful moment.
CRITIQUE
Music video director Melina Matsoukas brings her considerable talents to the big screen with Queen & Slim, a crime drama fitted out like Bonnie and Clyde but driven by the engine of contemporary racial politics. The gorgeous framing that characterizes her earlier work serves this debut beautifully, while understated turns from British actors Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith carry the film to its moving conclusion.
“Queen & Slim” tells the tale of a runaway couple played by Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith. “Queen and Slim” opens with a Tinder date in a local diner, Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith) and Slim (Daniel Kaluuya) discussing photographs.
Slim doesn’t like taking photos of him self’s. He knows what he looks like. But Queen believes that pictures are something deeper, proof of one’s existence. Slim isn’t having it. “My mother and father know I’m here. That’s enough,” he responds. This is the central thematic thread of the “Queen and Slim” legacy, whether it is immortalization by celluloid or memories embedded in the minds of family.
On the way back from their date, Queen and Slim are pulled over by a police officer. The situation escalates, eventually; Slim kills the officer in self-defense, launching the rest of the movie — a “Bonnie and Clyde”-sequel chase across the country as the couple attempts to escape to Cuba, bumping into strange characters along the way.
The strongest part of the film is undeniably Melina Matsoukas’ directing. Previously known for her work on Beyoncé’s “Lemonade,” she shows off a remarkable set of techniques, especially for a first-time feature film director.
Much of the film features the couple driving through America, and Matsoukas chooses to film most of this from the outside of the car — many of the shots are of Queen or Slim looking out through the window. Seeing the characters through a pane of glass is reminiscent of a museum or picture frame, again playing on this idea of legacy. Queen and Slim are being immortalized, both through the media sensationalizing their journey across the country in the film, and through metatextuality by the film itself.
Matsoukas also works well with cinematographer Tat Radcliffe to craft some beautiful images. There is a lot of cool turquoise and deep blues, as well as an overt interest in black features. There are multiple instances of presenting dialogue as voiceover while the camera observes Queen or Slim, content in capturing their quiet emotionality instead of the actual machinations of their speech.
Kaluuya as Slim and Turner-Smith as Queen both give good performances throughout the film, however they don’t do well together. Especially in the beginning, they lack the chemistry to properly sell their relationship, causing the film to drag in the first half. This could partly be attributed to some of the dialogue — in fact, the script, written by Lena Wait he, seems to be the film’s biggest flaw.
Wait he attempts to weave social commentary throughout the narrative, playing on imagery familiar to the viewers from media coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement. Most of it is quite clumsy, trying to be provocative but too self-conscious to offer up any new or interesting ideas.
One sequence in particular — a protest-turned-riot in support of Queen and Slim which is intercut with them having sex for the first time — is comedic in how completely it fumbles the theme Waithe sets up. There are also a few scenes that creep up on “Atlanta”-esque surrealism but don’t stick the landing and just come across as awkward.
However, the ending is beautiful. Queen and Slim make a final stand on an airport runway — cops on one side, a plane on the other — escape within reach. Everything comes together — their immortalization, their struggle, their lives, and their death.
We don’t end lingering on the fate of Queen and Slim. Instead, we see a picture they took earlier in the film becoming a symbol of their struggle and something bigger than them, a rallying point for change. It is, in effect, their legacy.
By the right Queen and Slim
Anchored by the magnetism of Kaluuya and Turner-Smith, Queen & Slim crackles with urgent anger and provocative swagger .A road movie with a lot going on under the bonnet.
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