A United Kingdom
Amma Asante (2016)
In 1925, at the age of four, Seretse Khama became king of the Bamangwato tribe in the Bechualand Protectorate in Southern Africa. Throughout the next two decades, his uncle, Tshekedi Khama, served as Seretse’s regent and guardian. After a year at Oxford, Seretse moved to London in 1946 to begin legal training at Inner Temple. The following year, he met Ruth Williams, a white office worker at Lloyd’s of London. Their interracial marriage in 1948 was deplored by the British and South African governments, as well as by the Bamangwato’s tribal elders. On the newlyweds’ initial return to Bechuanaland, Tshekedi Khama demanded the annulment of the marriage but Seretse, addressing public meetings of the Bamangwato, persuaded his people that he should remain their hereditary leader. International political opposition intensified, however: once Seretse was back in England to continue his law studies, he and Ruth were exiled from Bechuanaland by the British government. After a protest campaign on the couple’s behalf, sustained over several years, they were permitted to return to Seretse’s homeland. The political career on which he then embarked led to Bechuanaland’s achieving independence: he founded the Bechuanaland Democratic Party in the early 1960s and, in the territory’s first general elections in 1965, was returned as Prime Minister. In September 1966, Bechuanaland became the independent state of Botswana, with Seretse Khama its inaugural president. At the time the world’s third-poorest country, Botswana was transformed in the years that followed into a successful export-based economy. Seretse Khama, knighted in 1966, remained President until his death in 1980. Ruth survived him by more than twenty years. One of their sons, Ian Khama, has been President of Botswana since 2008.
Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom (a good title) tells the Khamas’ story from their first meeting in 1947 until the end of their exile in 1956. The film proceeds at an even-paced plod: you’re impatient for the photos of the real people and the what-happened-next summary legends to appear long before they eventually and inevitably do, just before the closing credits. As with her previous film Belle, Asante has turned a historically important racial story into a moralising primer. It’s true that protagonists who are thoroughly admirable and courageous, as Seretse Khama and Ruth Williams evidently were, aren’t always a dramatic advantage but this doesn’t bother Asante and Guy Hibbert, who wrote the pedestrian screenplay. They don’t let the two principals have any human detail or texture, let alone any personal flaws – as if these would impugn their moral integrity and might reduce our esteem for them. In the circumstances, David Oyelowo and Rosamund Pike give good performances. With Selma already under his belt, Oyelowo is getting to be an expert screen orator, and he makes Seretse Khama’s words convincingly his own. (It’s an advantage that Khama’s voice and speech patterns aren’t nearly so well known as Martin Luther King’s: there’s no danger here of Oyelowo’s interpretation coming across as skilful but careful mimicry, as I felt his playing of King did.) Rosamund Pike’s looks seem very right for the period of the story and she’s likeable as Ruth Williams. In her early scenes, her London accent has faint traces of Cockney that suddenly disappear. I wasn’t sure if this was a piece of characterisation (Ruth’s talking posher once she realises her boyfriend was born to be a king) or forgetfulness.
It’s hardly surprising, given A United Kingdom’s moral scheme and Amma Asante’s unnuanced direction, that some of the supporting cast are bad, especially those playing obstructive pillars of the British establishment. Jack Davenport is abominable as Alistair Canning, the British government’s man in South Africa: Davenport gives us not a character but a sneering commentary on Canning’s political position. Tom Felton is only relatively tolerable as Canning’s sidekick. The Africans in the story are condescendingly written. Tshekedi (Vusi Kunene), Seretse’s sister (Terry Pheto) and his aunt (Abena Ayivor) all belong to a nearly obligatory category of personnel in morally uplifting drama: initially suspicious of what the heroes are up to, they see sense in due course. As Ruth’s father, Nicholas Lyndhurst, with an unfortunately Hitlerish moustache and hairstyle, undergoes a similar conversion although he handles it creditably. Ruth’s mother (Anastasia Hille) and sister (Laura Carmichael) are more consistently sympathetic. The film, photographed by Sam McCurdy, is pleasant to look at and Patrick Doyle’s score is pleasant enough to listen to although it’s hardly original: it keeps threatening to turn into John Barry’s Out of Africa music.
For a movie that looks to aim no higher than to work through key events in the story, A United Kingdom does a clumsy job handling the political aspects. We understand that the post-war Labour government, up to its eyes in debt, can’t afford to alienate apartheid South Africa, rich in gold and uranium reserves. Reference is also made to the diamond mines that proved a major factor in Botswana’s later economic development. But a showdown between Prime Minister Attlee and Tony Wedgwood Benn (as he was at the time) is political dramatisation at its crudest: they face off in the public entrance hall of the House of Commons, shouting at each other as if anxious for the world to hear them. It’s hard to see why this scene has been included at all. Although Benn (Jack Lowden) was one of the Khamas’ most steadfast supporters, this doesn’t really come through in later scenes. Anton Lesser’s cameo is certainly unexpected: he achieves a bizarre first by presenting Clement Attlee as a hysteric. Although Winston Churchill doesn’t make an appearance, the narrative makes much of his opposition to the Labour government’s exile order, and of Churchill’s change of heart once the Conservatives return to office. Amma Asante’s flat-footed staging somehow manages to suggest that Seretse Khama policy was the central plank of the Tory manifesto in the 1951 general election. The film omits to mention that the Khamas were allowed to return to Bechuanaland as private citizens, after Seretse had renounced the Bamangwato tribal throne. Late on, after the post-exile return, Tshekedi Khama tells his nephew, ‘You’ve convinced me, Seretse, now you need to convince the country’. I’d no idea what Tshekedi meant by this or when he’s saying it. Seretse’s tribe appeared to be convinced by him back in 1948 – long before Tshekedi and other family members were. Is this scene an unexplained flash forward to the 1965 elections in Bechuanaland?
26 November 2016
Postscript: Seretse Khama is confronted by a pack of newshounds and a burst of flash bulbs in two or three standard-issue sequences. Blink and you’ll miss, as one of the reporters, an actor called Will Featherstone. A week before seeing A United Kingdom, I went with friends to a national touring production of Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall at York Theatre Royal. It’s not much of a play and this wasn’t, in many respects, much of a performance of it. But if you’ve got good people for Dan, the young murderer, and Mrs Bramson, the silly, selfish old woman who takes a shine to him, it’s enough to make an entertaining evening. Gwen Taylor was a fine Mrs Bramson and Will Featherstone’s physically and emotionally unpredictable Dan was often excellent, in spite of insufficiently attentive direction. I hope this actor goes on to better things on stage and to screen work in better films than A United Kingdom.