Starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Tom Wilkinson, Miranda Richardson, Penelope Wilton,Tom Reid
I don't always get to see the movies I want to see the moment they come out. While my schedule and my pocketbook play a part, it's mostly because not being in LA or NY means that the smaller movies pass me by.
One of the movies I got to see at last, thanks to RedBox, was Belle, the story of a mixed-race noblewoman living in England during the 1700s. Played by Gugu Mbatha Raw, whose career seems to be on an upward trajectory at the moment (see Beyond The Lights), Dido Elizabeth Belle was fathered by a titled Englishman who served as a naval officer in the West Indies. When her enslaved mother dies, Dido is scooped up from the islands and whisked to the seat of his family's vast holdings in central England.
While Dido's father makes very clear that he loves her and plans to provide for her, he cannot stay to raise her as his naval career is still in full swing. He instructs his elders to care for the girl. Dido's presence puts a serious crease in the alabaster foreheads of her grandparents, Lord and Lady Mansfield, and her maiden aunt, Lady Murray. After some initial "but she's black!" hemming and hawing, they cannot deny that the girl is heir to her father's fortune, and so must cope as best they can with creating rules for how this titled free person of color will live out her days in a society that hasn't yet learned how to deal with this sort of thing. As in the beginning of Beyond The Lights (as well as the forthcoming Black Or White), coping with the dressing of African American hair becomes a metaphor for the knotty dilemmas confronting white society with a black person in their midst.
Ghanaian-British director Amma Asante spends little screen time dwelling on the darker side of Dido's predicament at first, showing a beautiful young girl who wants for nothing in the way of clothes, jewels, nourishment and education under the protection of her grandfather at the well-to-do Mansfield Family estate. What's more, she has a companion thanks to the presence of another cousin, also named Elizabeth, who is around the same age. Dido is seemingly well loved and cared for, but when the family comes into contact with the rest of the world, she is generally kept out of sight. As she and Elizabeth come of age this becomes tougher to do. While her cousin prepares to marry without a dowry from her remarried father, Dido finds herself in an unusual bind: related to a good family and rich enough to provide an admirable dowry, with a mixed-race status that society sees as a literal stain on her attractiveness as a bride. Despite this, she is actively sought by the son of another respectable but impoverished family, but she is then physically disrespected by her fiance's bigoted brother. Money and race combine to unravel her engagement.
Meanwhile the intellectually curious Dido comes into contact with a brash vicar's son, James, who wants to go into the law under her grandfather's tutelage. Lord Mansfield is a distinguished and influential high court judge, and has had Dido assisting him with his letters. The film then becomes more about connecting Dido's story to the historically significant Zong massacre, a case appealed to the British high court in which the captain and crew of the British slave ship The Zong threw about half of their cargo of enslaved Africans overboard to drown, purportedly because there was not enough water on board to sustain them and the crew during a stormy passage, and filed an insurance claim when they reached Jamaica asking for reimbursement for the lost "merchandise." When the insurance company refused to pay, the case went to the high court. The truth emerges that poor conditions on the overcrowded, poorly managed ship led many of the slaves to sicken, considerably diminishing their worth on the open market. Rather than take the loss, the owners decided that the slaves were worth more dead than alive. The sheer horror of this -- as many as 142 African men, women, and children chained together and thrown to their deaths -- boggles the mind. The film has Dido and the vicar's son colluding to piece together evidence against the Zong's owners, and posits the idea that Lord Mansfield's own experience raising a person of color were what inclined him to rule against the Liverpool-based Gregson slave trading company that owned the Zong.
The 1783 case -- which was retried after this verdict -- was an important milestone in British history, because it turned popular sentiment toward the regulation of slavery in the British colonies and then to the eventual abolition of slavery altogether. The pressure was such that one prosecutor even attempted, unsuccessfully, to have the Zong's officers charged with murder, but formal accusations were never filed. Britain did abolish slavery some 90 years before the American South was forced to emancipate its slaves due to Lincoln's decree, with Lord Mansfield himself ruling in 1772 that slavery had never been authorized legally in the country and should never be.
The film is beautifully photographed, exquisitely designed, and wonderfully acted. The subject matter is fascinating -- most people are surprised to learn that a black woman of privilege existed in England during the 18th century -- but the difficulties she faced and the implications for society at large due to her presence are presented as mere inconveniences and not the racial lightning strikes they must have been. Part of the problem may be that the most notable thing about Dido was her anachronistic presence in the highly stratified English society of the times; she herself wasn't a rabble-rouser, she was a young woman born at a time when women didn't make much noise and where she had few other people of color with similar status or influence with whom to commune or commiserate. The script does what it can to make her a feisty, free-thinking young woman with an inherent sympathy for enslaved Africans, but Dido's journey doesn't seem to come with any moment of real revelation or change. She doesn't devote herself to the abolition movement, or make a voyage back to Jamaica to find her mother's people, or seek out other free born people of color in England. The film implies that she will marry the vicar's son, who has been elevated to a "gentleman" due to his acceptance as a law apprentice, and she will continue to live in an all-white world as a kind of social curiosity.
Kudos to Amma Asante for getting the film made. This is an important story that needed to be told. And Gugu is eminently watchable as an actress.
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