âIn âWidows,â the power of Davisâs performance is that she lets you know, in every scene, that Veronica is living in a world of treachery.â
Steve McQueenâs real-world heist movie gives Viola Davis a powerful role as a crime widow who takes cold-eyed command of her desperation.
Speaking on stage at the Toronto International Film Festival, right before the premiere of âWidows,â his first movie since â12 Years a Slaveâ (which was five years ago), director Steve McQueen talked about how important it was to set movies in the world of real, recognizable human beings. A lot of us would second that sentiment, yet itâs still not what you expect to hear from someone whoâs introducing a heist film. The genre has been around in a major way since the early â50s, and the template has always been this: When characters get together to plan and execute a robbery, we may see the quiet desperation of their lives, we may taste an ashy undertone of cynical âreality,â but itâs really all about the trip-wire cleverness of the crime itself. Heist movies unfold in a caper-film bubble, and that, one way or another, is their key pleasure.
But âWidows,â as McQueen implied, is another story. Itâs a movie in which three women, whose husbands all perished in a robbery gone wrong, band together to steal $5 million, even though none of them has the slightest experience at acting like a criminal. And the web of dire circumstances that lead them to hatch this scheme in no mere set-up â itâs the dramatic heart of the movie. âWidows,â adapted from a British TV crime drama that was first broadcast in 1983, has a script co-written by McQueen and the novelist and screenwriter Gillian Flynn (âGone Girl,â âSharp Objectsâ), and it presents an enjoyably dark and sleazy vision of ordinary lives intertwining with the hurly-burly of street thuggery, local machine politics, and half a dozen other forms of daily corruption.
The movie, set in contemporary Chicago, opens with Veronica Rawlins (Viola Davis) and her husband, Harry (Liam Neeson), who happens to be major crook, kissing the hell out of each other in bed. The simple fact of a mixed-race marriage presented this casually is still startling to see in a mainstream movie, to the point that we canât help but invest this passionate pair with a certain romantic idealism. But thatâs snuffed pretty quickly. Their early moments are intercut with a turbulent chase, seen from the vantage of a getaway van with its back doors banging open, that ends with Harry and his crew being fired on by the police, until the van explodes into flames, killing all the men onboard. So much for domestic bliss.
Veronica is suddenly a widow. More than that, sheâs a widow whose husband left her owing $2 million. Thatâs how much he stole from Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry), whoâs running for alderman of his ward, but heâs also a strong-arm crook who demands that Veronica liquidate her assets, including the sprawling penthouse she lives in, to pay him back.
Viola Davisâs commanding performance roots this scenario in icy fear and shock. Veronica canât believe whatâs happened to her (overnight, she has lost everything), and her eyes tell you that she knows itâs just going to get worse. She keeps having flashbacks to her life with Harry, including one where they nuzzle to Nina Simone singing âWild Is the Wind.â Itâs hard not to notice that Davis, her hair cut short, her eyes beams of fury, would be an ideal actress to portray Nina Simone. She has that kind of force.
In âWidows,â the power of Davisâs performance is that she lets you know, in every scene, that Veronica is living in a world of treachery. Sheâs the victim of violent bad luck, and of crooks whoâve given her a month to come up with an impossible sum of money. But the way McQueen stages the movie, itâs also saying that sheâs the victim of a society thatâs no longer looking out for us. Itâs every man â every woman â for herself. The dialogue in âWidowsâ is thick with salty insults, and McQueen creates a hypnotic panorama of everyday corruption that feels less like a crime caper than like something out of a Robert Altman film or a Richard Price novel.
For a while, it works brilliantly. The first half of âWidowsâ is one moment of playful threat after another, whether itâs Jamal Manning coming over to Veronicaâs apartment to set the stakes, or his thug brother, Jatemme â played as a scary slit-eyed sociopath by Daniel Kaluuya, from âGet Outâ â taking random stabs at a man in a wheelchair to get the information he wants, or Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell), the politician whoâs trying to hold onto the alderman seat thatâs been in his family for 60 years, manipulating his constituents and the media with a program called Minority Woman Own Work, or Jackâs father, Tom (Robert Duvall), making toxically explicit the racist undercurrents of their political reign.
Harry, in death, has left Veronica a notebook that includes the blueprint of a robbery he didnât get around to committing. As soon as she takes one look at it, Veronica knows sheâs going to carry out that heist as if her life depended on it. Which Davisâs feral presence tells you it does.
Veronica enlists her two fellow crime widows because theyâre natural allies, and she has no one else to turn to. Tall, willowy Alice (Elizabath Debicki), whose husband was a wife-beater, takes the bad advice of her mother (Jacki Weaver) and markets herself on a website for âcompanions,â which leads her to connect with a real-estate player (Lukas Haas) who thinks everything is a transaction. Meanwhile, Linda (Michelle Rodriguez), a holy-hell firecracker, discovers that her husband was gambling away the rent money on her clothing store, so she has less than nothing to lose.
âWidowsâ tells the tale of a robbery committed by three women (with a fourth, a hairdresser played with unflappable moxie by Cynthia Erivo, as their driver), yet itâs as far from âOceanâs 8â as you could get. Itâs a reality-based feminist caper-thatâs-not-actually-a-caper. The movie has at least one twist that will shock you, and itâs galvanizing to see Davis seize the kind of role she doesnât have to cozy up to. The dialogue has the snap of witty danger thatâs become Gillian Flynnâs trademark.
Yet âWidows,â while a highly original and entertaining variation on the heist film, isnât a home run. The robbery is more violent than clever, which is part of the point. It, too, unfolds in the real word, rather than the lighter-than-air Hollywood world of Rube Goldberg frippery. Yet given how smart a movie âWidowsâ is, thereâs something a touch haphazard about the way that the heist connects to everything that has come before it. Many of the filmâs dramatic scenes are so striking that itâs almost as if âWidowsâ would have been a better movie without the heist. (In that case, though, it wouldnât have passed muster as a commercial thriller.)
The strongest aspect of âWidowsâ is the way the movie gets us â and keeps us â rooting for its desperate-living heroines. Theyâre way past the point of just wanting to have fun (the subtext of almost every heist movie); theyâre less concerned with comeuppance than sheer survival. âWidowsâ presents their plunge into existential crime as a raggedly noble crusade. Yet while the film is stuffed to the gills with observations about race, sex, class, politics, and the scars bred by a newly indifferent America, âWidowsâ also leaves you wondering what the movie would have looked like had it been a little more irresponsible.
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