Widows

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.

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