When centering big-budget films on historical events, directors typically take one of three approaches. Directors either tell the event’s story by using it as the movie’s central backdrop, like the Million Man March in Spike Lee’s Get on the Bus; or they take the biopic route by focusing on a central figure, like Michael B. Jordan’s Oscar Grant in Fruitvale Station; or they lens it like a straightforward history lesson, as in Ava DuVernay’s Selma.
In the period-piece drama Sarah’s Oil (executive produced by Ciara and Russell Wilson), filmmaker Cyrus Nowrasteh gives us the history lesson method: Sarah Rector (actress Naya Desir-Johnson), an 11-year-old Black grandchild of Creek Indians in the early 1900s, receives a parcel of oil-rich land in Oklahoma under the Treaty of 1866, and fights against local whites trying to swindle away her inheritance.
There’s a multitude of unsung Black historical stories yet to be told, so all respect is due to everyone involved for bringing something like Sarah’s Oil to the big screen. Hollywood has arguably come a long way between the days when John Singleton’s Rosewood (about the massacre of an all-Black town in Florida) almost tanked his career in the late ’90s and director Steve McQueen’s Academy Award-winning 12 Years a Slave (about the unjust enslavement of Solomon Northup in 1841) decades later.
Nowrasteh structures Sarah’s Oil like a sincere Black History Month movie. But given the reality of how the film industry barely scratches the surface of all the “based on a true story” Black history, it could be telling, the mere existence of Sarah’s Oil still registers as a breath of fresh air.
Young Sarah Rector’s underdog story starts when, convinced that oil courses underneath her inherited plot of land, she persuades her father, Joe (Kenric Green), to approach racist oil moguls to drill for petroleum. Soon enough, her family joins forces with a wily prospector named Bert (Zachary Levi), who’s willing to go against the bigwigs trying to lie, cheat and murder their way into her rightful riches. Based on the true story of a tweenager who made millions leasing her land to the Standard Oil Company in the 1910s, Sarah’s Oil presents an intelligent, negotiation-savvy girl and her self-assured, proud parents making their way through the Jim Crow South with dignity and sharp wits—a scenario even harder to navigate with an oil fortune in the balance.
Critics may accuse the film of the so-called “magical Negro trope,” considering the crux of the story leans heavily on white wildcatter Bert overcoming his prejudices and getting in touch with himself via his relationship with Sarah. But as in real life, she overcomes all obstacles and wins her wealth, leading to an adulthood of hosting lavish, jazz-era soirées in Kansas City featuring Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Though she lost most of her riches during the Great Depression—an anti-Hollywood ending fact the film excludes—the story of Sarah’s Oil remains in the vein of uplifting biopics like Queen of Katwe and Hidden Figures, which makes this well-made film worth the watch.