Widows
(2018)
Dir. Steve McQueen
Written by Steve
McQueen and Gillian Flynn
Starring Viola
Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo, Colin Farrell,
Brian Tyree Henry, Daniel Kaluuya
I doubt
anyone would have expected director Steve McQueen to follow up his 2013 Best
Picture-winning 12 YEARS A SLAVE with an adaptation of a 1983 British
crime-drama TV series, transplanting its plot to 2018 Chicago. And I most sincerely
doubt that even someone who managed to guess all that would have predicted that
the screenplay would bear the unlikely credit of “written by Steve McQueen and
Gillian Flynn.” And yet, in just a few moments of screentime, it all makes
perfect sense. The obvious explanation is that McQueen intends to use the
contemporary setting and diverse cast as a means to examine social, racial, and
political structures. The less obvious explanation is that he also
intends to make a tight, tense, procedural crime thriller, and considers this
not only to be an equally important goal, but a necessarily symbiotic one.
This is
certainly not something I would ever have guessed he would be interested in,
but here we are, and it’s certainly a better world for it. Frankly put, WIDOWS
is a goddamn masterpiece of carefully-crafted crime fiction with the added
bonus of doubling as a closely observed survey of modern American
socio-political stratification and dysfunction. And even with all that
ambition, it’s resolutely unpretentious and completely unafraid of trashy genre
conventions, never pandering but equally never failing to entertain. Freed of
the weighty responsibility he had in making one of only a handful of American
movies to ever directly address slavery (and based on the real-life memoirs of
its protagonist, no less!) McQueen feels more unpredictable and eclectic here,
more willing to follow his artistic muse as it wanders freely amidst the
cultural detritus of modern American* culture, from the profound to the pulpy.
And wander it does, through quite a lot of plot; the titular widows are
Veronica, Linda, and Alice (Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, and Elizabeth
Debicki) who are forced to turn to crime after their criminal husbands (Liam
Neeson, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and Jon Bernthal, respectively) get themselves
killed in a botched heist, leaving their spouses in serious trouble with
another local gangster (Brian Tyree Henry) who wants two million dollars from
them to fund his campaign for alderman of a South Side Chicago ward, a race
he’s running against a reluctant legacy candidate (Colin Ferrell) with problems
of his own. And if that’s not enough characters for you, Cynthia Erivo, Daniel
Kaluuya, Garret Dillahunt, Carrie Coon, Jacki Weaver, Robert Duvall, Lukas Haas,
Matt Walsh and Kevin J. O'Connor are in there too.
That huge
cast of characters is, of course, the result of its origins as a mini-series, and
as an adaptation thereof (the second adaptation, in point of fact; there was
already an American version in 2002!) it does have the slight sense of
something more sprawling and episodic which has been edited down to its bare
bones. But McQueen dances between diversions so confidently that it simply
feels epic, rather than disjointed. If it’s all over the place, it’s because
it’s trying to tell the story of a whole city, with a million separate moving
parts, all of which are important and all of which are an intrinsic part of the
whole. In fact, if anything, the movie’s biggest problem is that its 130
minutes are so tightly packed with rich detail and curious digressions that
it’s full of things we wish we had more time to explore. Michelle Rodriguez’s
character, for example, doesn’t end up with quite enough screen time
specifically devoted to her to entirely emerge as a fully-defined character.
And you could probably edit her out of the movie, or combine her with Cynthia
Erivo’s character to create a sleeker screenplay. But then, you’d miss out on
the fascinating scene where she shows up at the house of a frumpy, middle-aged
mark who she needs to surreptitiously pump for information, only to discover
they’ve both recently experienced a tragic loss, and then fumble her way into a
spontaneous and ill-advised makeout session! This is a wild, live-wire little
bit of plotting which could easily descend into campy overkill in the hands of
a lesser director, and throwing it in without any particular narrative
necessity or specific denouement would be recklessly playing with fire for any
director.
But McQueen
is not just any director; in his hands, this scene becomes a perfectly
fascinating little zen koan, a short story all of its own, equal parts
illustrative and mysterious. Does Rodriguez do this cynically and
strategically, as a ploy to try and put this guy off-guard? Does she do it
defensively, as a disruption that affords her an escape? Or does she do it
impulsively, as these two characters from completely different walks of life
suddenly find themselves powerfully, magnetically intimate due to their shared
grief? Is it none of these things, all of them, does she even know why
she does what she does? The movie isn’t telling, but just this one scene
is rich enough to inspire hours of thoughtful reflection.
In that
same vein, please find also the most singularly and surprisingly compelling
on-screen relationship of the year, in the tenuous, unexpected bit of
vulnerability which develops between Viola Davis and Elizabeth Debicki. The two
women could hardly be more different; Davis is a flinty, self-assured over-50 African-American
career woman, and though we can see from the opening that she is clearly still
a powerfully sexual being, she is certainly nobody’s idea of a sex object.
Debicki, on the other hand, at first seems to be defined entirely by her
appeal as a sex object; she’s impossibly, almost parodically tall and slim,
with her exaggerated figure, pale skin, blonde hair and huge eyes giving her the
appearance of a lab-grown Barbie doll. And a doll is apparently all she’s ever
been, having spent her whole life relying on the largesse of criminal (and
often violent) boyfriends. These two women seem to have nothing in common; really,
their sole shared characteristic seems to be how little either seems interested
in making friends. And yet, quietly, around the margins, something develops
between them which doesn’t materialize between the other women, who seem to
have a strictly business –and sometimes out-and-out antagonistic—relationship. Friendship
doesn’t seem to quite describe the situation, but there appears between
these two committed survivors an unexpected little note of intimacy, a tiny
crack in their mutual armors of ruthless, unsentimental pragmatism. Perhaps it
is their very dissimilarity which makes them feel comfortable enough with each
other to let the mask slip, even if only a tiny bit; I am reminded of how
Werner Herzog managed to break past the natural cultural defenses of his
Southeast-Texas interview subjects in INTO THE ABYSS specifically because he was such a complete
outsider. Sometimes we can be more comfortable sharing things about ourselves
with people who don’t come from the same backgrounds –and therefore with whom
we have, perhaps, less to lose—than with people who might otherwise seem to
have a more innate understanding of our lives.
This
relationship, in all its complexity and nuance, happens on the margins of the
film; tiny moments here or there, adding up slowly and almost subliminally, but
it’s a perfect example of how the movie densely packs meaning into its runtime,
and masterfully communicates itself without resorting to lecturing. And only a
talent as securely confident as McQueen would handle something so lightly which
it is absolutely at the heart of the movie (SPOILER: the film even ends with a
beautiful grace note centered on the ambiguity of their further friendship – are
these women irresolvably creatures of two different worlds, and bound only by the
memory of this single shared experience, or are they capable of bridging that
gap and recognizing that they have more in common than it might at first seem?)
and as such is a crucial facet of the movie’s most intriguing fascination: the
ways in which a rigidly divided 21st century America (by class, by race, by
gender, by age, by politics, by geography) intersects in unexpected ways. It’s
a thesis which is best exemplified in the movie’s most bravura moment, my easy
pick for the single most perfect shot of the entire year: a long, unbroken tracking shot of a wealthy politician’s car driving the three minutes it takes to get from the overgrown, low-income apartment complexes where he’s been campaigning to a
neighborhood of posh mansions where he lives. It’s the perfect visual and
thematic metaphor for the way in which these disparate peoples are both
irreconcilably separated and intrinsically connected. What could be better than
a movie with that kind of effortlessly virtuosic, immensely thoughtful
craftsmanship that’s still a crackin’ good time? If you didn’t catch it in
theaters this year, you really blew it, but fortunately you still have a chance
to set things right. Before you spend one more dollar on some dull Marvel sequel
or godforsaken “live action” Disney remake, you owe it to the culture and to
yourself to see this. Relentlessly entertaining while never dumbing itself
down, this is the perfect exemplar of what popular cinema ought to aspire to.
*And
British culture, as both the original mini-series and McQueen himself hail from
across the pond.
THE BEST OF 2018, AS SEEN FROM 2019: THE SERIES
