A Unit­ed Kingdom

When Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike) and Seretse Khama (David Oyelowo) met and fell in love in 1947, they knew their fam­i­lies would dis­ap­prove of the union. Yet they prob­a­bly didn’t expect to find the full weight of nation­al gov­ern­ments con­spir­ing against them. She was a white Lon­don­er work­ing as an office clerk, he was an African prince and heir to the throne of Bechua­na­land (now Botswana). Their mar­riage was seen as a trans­gres­sive, provoca­tive act, cross­ing lines of race, class and pol­i­tics. It was met with a par­tic­u­lar­ly dim view in Bechuanaland’s neigh­bour­ing coun­try, South Africa, whose Prime Min­is­ter called it ​“nau­se­at­ing.”

All of this is fer­tile emo­tion­al and polit­i­cal ter­ri­to­ry to explore, but A Unit­ed King­dom is not up to the task. Direc­tor Amma Asante and screen­writer Guy Hib­bert (work­ing from Susan Williams’ acclaimed book ​‘Colour Bar’) have smoothed the edges and flat­tened the com­plex­i­ties of Seretse and Ruth’s sto­ry, fill­ing it with one-dimen­sion­al char­ac­ters and trite expos­i­to­ry dia­logue. The British author­i­ties are rep­re­sent­ed by a pair of shady diplo­mats played by Jack Dav­en­port and Tom Fel­ton, seem­ing­ly designed to elic­it hiss­es from the audi­ence when­ev­er they appear on screen. Their sneer­ing super­cil­ious­ness is so pro­nounced it is insult­ing both to the cen­tral cou­ple and the audi­ence. ​“Do you know what apartheid means?” Davenport’s Sir Alis­tair Can­ning asks Ruth ear­ly in the film, and we might won­der if he’s address­ing her or us.

There are so many fas­ci­nat­ing his­tor­i­cal wrin­kles left frus­trat­ing­ly unex­plored here, notably Win­ston Churchill’s role in the dra­ma, protest­ing against Seretse’s exile from his home­land when in oppo­si­tion before reneg­ing on his promise to rein­state him after com­ing to pow­er. Instead, Asante focus­es on the love sto­ry, but the sketchi­ly devel­oped romance between Seretse and Ruth makes it feel like the film is built on unsta­ble foundations.

They meet, court, mar­ry and are ostracised by their fam­i­lies in the space of a few brief scenes. We get lit­tle sense of the deep devo­tion bind­ing them togeth­er. In fact, the two stars are more impres­sive when they are apart than when they’re togeth­er. Pike’s strongest scenes occur in the sec­ond half of the film, as she attempts to ingra­ti­ate her­self into the lives of the African women for whom she is a most unwel­come queen. Oyelowo, mean­while, is at his best in small­er moments: a flash of fear as he plays down rumours of rebel­lion, or being forced to hold his tongue in the face of British condescension.

Curi­ous­ly, how­ev­er, Oyelowo’s tear­ful speech­es car­ry none of the force that the actor brought to Ava DuVernay’s rois­ter­ing Mar­tin Luther King sto­ry, Sel­ma, per­haps because his tri­umph here feels too easy. A Unit­ed King­dom is both dra­mat­i­cal­ly and visu­al­ly unimag­i­na­tive. It com­pris­es a series of inert con­ver­sa­tions fol­lowed by repet­i­tive shots of African scenery, and the film­mak­ers’ deci­sion to fol­low the path of least resis­tance does their sub­ject mat­ter a disservice.

With this film and Belle, Asante has cer­tain­ly shown she has a knack for dig­ging up for­got­ten sto­ries from British his­to­ry that deserve to be told. Unfor­tu­nate­ly a film like this is like­ly to be remem­bered as lit­tle more than a footnote.