Steve McQueen's Widows is a sketch of urban corruption, a low-key indictment of racism and (a touch louder) misogyny, a rich character study. It's also a hell of a crime pic.
The film literally begins with a bang: two men dragging a wounded third into a garage and into a van, the fourth hauling heavy bags of loot; the garage door rolls open to a barrage of SWAT gunfire and the van rises rear-high, flipped over by an expanding fireball.
McQueen doesn't waste much time. Taking the original series (which he saw and loved at 13 years of age) and collaborating with writer Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl) he condenses six fifty-minute episodes into an old-fashioned heist flick overstuffed with plot and subtext, the latter giving the former a thoughtful texture, the former goosing the latter to unruly entertaining life.
With the men dead we meet the women who suffer the consequences of their passing: Veronica Rawlings (Viola Davis), Linda Perelli (Michelle Rodriguez), Alice Gunner (Elizabeth Debicki). Veronica's husband Harry (Liam Neeson) stole money (a cool two million dollars) from gangster Jamal Manning (Bryan Tyree Henry) who wants it all back in thirty days (or else); Linda owns a store selling quinceanera gowns which (she learns) is being repossessed to pay for her husband Carlos' (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) gambling debts; Alice sports a bruise that her husband Florek (Jon Bernthal) gave her. Alice, in addition to the occasional beating, is also without a source of income; her mother Agnieszka (Jacki Weaver) suggests prostitution.
Veronica with the two million hanging over her head reaches out to a local politician friend of Harry's: Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell), who pleads helplessness. She turns to her fellow grievers and presents an alternate more desperate solution: she found Harry's notebooks outlining the details for projects past and planned; they--Harry and his companions' widows--should carry out what should have been Harry's next job, and net themselves an even cooler five million.
The plan proceeds not without bumps, and here's where the women's resourcefulness comes into play: when they need a getaway driver Linda recruits her daughter's babysitter Belle (Cynthia Erivo) who turns out to be fleet on her feet and aggressive behind the wheel; when they need guns Alice feigns ignorance and approaches a seasoned gun owner--a woman--for advice, citing a fellow female's need for home protection; later Alice pulls off an even bigger coup by seducing real estate developer David (Lukas Haas) into revealing the location described in Harry's notebook (the plan maps the rooms and dimensions to the square foot but carefully refrains from naming the building). As Veronica explains to her co-conspirators, their biggest asset is being who they are. Why? "No one thinks we have the balls to pull this off."
All this takes place against a background of big-city politics: Manning needed the two million Harry stole to fund his campaign for city alderman; helping Veronica recover that two million would have meant Mulligan--running for the same position--could lose (hence his refusal). Turns out Mulligan is in deeper than he lets on, but part of what's both infuriating and invigorating about the film is how men deny women aid or even simple recognition, either out of calculation or sheer cluelessness; the women are left with no choice but to seize the initiative for themselves.
There's been discussion (by Richard Brody, in the New Yorker) of the film's implied political cynicism (skip the rest of this paragraph if you haven't seen the film!)--Manning is both a crime boss and corrupt politico; Mulligan is involved with the unions and equally corrupt, though he has managed to keep arm's length from the more violent criminal activities in the city. The film is accused of painting a withering portrait of unions and local officials, has little to say about grassroots activism beyond its apparent uselessness. Some of this may have something to do with McQueen's fatalism on display in films like Shame and 12 Years a Slave; I submit that McQueen like most cynics is a closet romantic. Jack is dominated (or to put it bluntly, cowed) by his father Tom (Robert Duvall), the most virulently racist and misogynist character in the film and a symbol of old moneyed white power; McQueen and Flynn resolve Jack's problem by having Tom shot in the course of the women's heist. Jack wins the election mainly through sympathy votes and--flawed and steeped in corruption that he is--may represent the city's best hope for political reform; at worse Veronica (who knows Jack's secrets) stands guard and can expose him if necessary.
Brody also accuses the film of grafting much of the racial and political commentary to the plot without much thought to having one reinforce the other, and here I think he's on more solid ground. We learn of a source of pain in Veronica's marriage--involving an all-too-common police shooting--and aside from being a useful plot function the flashback feels like a nod to current events; more interesting is Jack's awareness that he's a white politician running in an increasingly black community (a subplot that may have been inspired by The Wire)--and hopefully this awareness keeps the man in moral check.
Love the cast--Debicki's Alice is a startlingly deft student of the human gullibility that she has (presumably) observed all her life, and I enjoy watching Erivo's Belle spinning sprinting vaulting over walls, but really the film belongs to Davis' Veronica. Lying languorously on white satin, giving and taking pleasure from her equally white husband, she's an extravagant household pet to be pampered and spoiled. There's pathos in having husband and security taken away; there's also a sense of vindication seeing her step up take charge of her life, finding the steel beneath her satin.
I'm familiar with McQueen's confident gliding camera style, how he uses it to counterbalance the heavy inevitability in his pictures; applied to this genre exercise it's a refreshing antidote to the cliche of jangling crime footage cut to frenetic beat. McQueen's camera stalks after its characters, a stealthy presence that only adds to the film's sense of menace; in Davis Debicki Rodriguez Erivo the director also holds a winning hand of queens that add physical charisma and a lived sense of desperation to what (when all is said and done) is a terrific underrated thriller.
First published in Businessworld 3.29.19
No comments:
Post a Comment