A United Kingdom is based on the greatest love story you probably didn’t have a clue about. I know I didn’t. It’s based on the true story of Seretse Khama, heir to the African kingdom of Bechuanaland (now Botswana), and Ruth Williams, a typist, who fell in love in 1940s London and married despite everyone and everything trying to separate them, including a vicious colonial British government. But this, sadly, is not the greatest film about the greatest love story you didn’t have a clue about. It’s OK. It does the job. It’s serviceable. It won’t be the biggest disappointment in your life. The story’s too good for it to get away completely. But it’s simplistic, exposition-heavy, joyless and focuses on the obstacles to their love rather than the love itself. I was begging throughout: come on, come on, give me something to feel.
The film is directed by Amma Asante (Belle) with a script by Guy Hibbert (Blood and Oil, Eye in the Sky) who, it has to be said, is not averse to cliché (‘You left as a boy and must return as a man’) or having people tell each other what they would surely already know. (At one point, the British prime minister has to be told: ‘We need South Africa to save us from Stalin.’ Personally, I would worry about a prime minister who hadn’t worked that out for himself.)
The film opens in London in 1947, when Seretse (David Oyelowo), who is a law student, and Ruth (Rosamund Pike) first meet at a London Missionary Society dance. Their eyes lock. He asks for a dance. They discover a mutual love of jazz. They go on a few bland dates. It’s hard to see why they might consider each other so special, but perhaps she fell for Seretse’s neat line in exposition, as in: ‘I grew up with my little sister.
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