Widows
Directed by Steve McQueen
Starring Viola Davis, Elizabeth Debicki, Colin Farrell, Michelle Rodriguez, Cynthia Erivo, Daniel Kaluuya, Robert Duvall, Carrie Coon, and Liam Neeson
Reviewed by Michael Dalton
[rating: 4/5]
Early in the hot, violent, fast film Widows, director Steve McQueen makes an inspired choice. We watch Colin Farrell’s politician Jack Mulligan depart a publicity appearance at a park in the suburbs of Chicago. McQueen sits his camera on the front of the car and while Mulligan sits in the car and debates with his assistant, we watch as the scenery moves from cheap to middle class to the politician’s home that features classic architecture and a manicured lawn. In one fluid move McQueen makes it clear his characters enjoy little divide. Tension abounds in this neatly conceived film and from the opening scene where we watch a husband and wife, Harry and Veronica Rawlings, in a passionate embrace only for it to be interrupted by gun blazing violence, its clear what McQueen has in mind. Forget the grieving, this will be about surviving.
The characters themselves, from every corner of society, privileged, downtrodden, struggling, or gleefully thuggish are written thinly but thankfully the casting overshadows it. The ladies, who all lost their husbands in a heist gone wrong, are an eclectic bunch. Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) was the owner of a store that sells gowns and accessories (all repossessed in the aftermath), Alice (Elizabeth Debicki) is an abused wife left penniless, and then there’s Veronica (Viola Davis), whose husband (Liam Neeson), a professional criminal and the ringleader of the robbery, stole two million dollars from a former drug dealer and now burgeoning politician, Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry). Veronica has of course inherited his debt and she has little time to pay it. Veronica picks up the pieces, rounds up the widows, and suggests, thanks to a detailed notebook left behind by her husband outlining another heist, they pull off the Big Job themselves.
Widows is loaded down with contrivance and conveniently placed clues (keep an eye out for a silver flask) yet despite it all, Davis, Debicki, Rodriguez, and Cynthia Erivo as Belle, an athletic addition who runs from one side of Chicago to the other making ends meet (she deserves her own movie) and takes on the role of driver, are such a glorious quartet the films grows more vibrant as it hurtles along. There is a fourth widow, Amanda (Carrie Coon) but her part in the game comes later (the audience I saw it with rumbled at the revelation).
12 Years A Slave this ain’t and there’s little of the psychological desperation that swamped Shame, McQueen’s tale of sex addiction. The darkness is here, there, and everywhere and although there’s plenty of shame here, he doesn’t dig deep. Widows is all surface, swift and often brutal, and its familiar twist, one that thriller aficionados will see coming, seems beneath him. In many ways the film resembles Oceans Eight, the other all-female heist movie this year, but the danger there was only in being apprehended (the film was so light you never doubted their success). McQueen loads his deck with dangerous stakes. Manning has a henchman, Jatemme (Daniel Kaluuya) who is so ruthless he comes off like a zombie and Robert Duvall as Farrell’s father, a racist curmudgeon, scores high. “Don’t wanna see you be the first Mulligan to lose to a nigger” he lectures his son who lives for the day he’ll be rid of him.
The film’s real saving grace is of course Viola Davis. Few actors can demonstrate strength and vulnerability so convincingly. Just when you think she couldn’t take you any further, she corners you again. Watch her prepare for her husband’s funeral. Horrendous it may be but she’ll survive.
