Uzo Aduba has all the talent to play activist
Virginia Walden gets but is let down a script uninterested in the issues it depicts
Uzo Aduba has just picked up a well-deserved Emmy for playing the pioneering African
American congresswoman Shirley Chisholm in Mrs America. Now she is on the other side of
Washington DC, as the struggling single parent turned education reform activist Virginia Walden.
In early scenes, Virginia drags her weary frame through school metal detectors to urgent parent-teacher conferences about her 15-year-old son. Then it’s on to meetings with the bank to plead for loans to pay for private school and her second
Job cleaning toilets at a congresswoman’s office. On the horizon, the Capitol dome gleams, contrasting with crumbling, graffitied buildings of Walden’s neighbourhood, a simplistic shorthand for DC’s notorious inequalities. The cliched choreography of a school-bully fight scene – they round on the class nerd and trample his glasses – is also typical of this film’s surface-skimming depiction of social problems.