BEHIND EVERY GOOD MAN ...
Heist flick Widows picks up where their late thieving husbands left off
It’s been 10 years since Steve McQueen burst onto the feature film world with Hunger, the story of Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands that made Michael Fassbender a box office name. The British director stumbled a bit with his second feature, Shame, then roared back with 12 Years a Slave, which took the 2014 Oscar for best picture.
His newest feature, Widows, is the kind of double-crossing heist thriller that is usually a dime-adozen venture. But in the hands of the master, it’s a consistently surprising, twisty, (female)character-driven drama. And
amazingly, this very current story is inspired by a 1983 British TV series McQueen saw when he was a boy.
The set-up is delivered in the opening scene, in which we watch a heist going wrong, with much of the footage shot from the interior of the getaway van. (Talk about an inside job!) A crew of robbers led by Liam Neeson — who’ll return in ghostly flashbacks — gets taken down by the police in what would be the dark finale to many a movie.
Instead, this one moves on to the men’s widows. Veronica ( Viola Davis) is Neeson’s grieving wife, and the natural leader of the group, not least because would-be politician (Brian Tyree Henry) comes to her first, looking for repayment of the money lost in the heist. (This is what screenwriters call motivation.) There’s also Michelle Rodriguez, a compact, muscular 5-foot-5, whom you’d expect to have hidden reserves of strength, and willowy Elizabeth Debicki (6-foot2); expect the unexpected.
They’re eventually joined by Belle (Cynthia Erivo) and this Ocean’s 4 decides to take the plans for their late husbands’ next job and do it themselves. We’re never in any doubt about their abilities, although McQueen and co-writer Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl) insert a subtle joke to the effect that finding decent child care might be harder than stealing a couple of million dollars.
There’s great fun in the notion of a heist that’s all worked out and yours for the (under) taking; who hasn’t dreamt they could pull off the perfect crime if the right team and the right plan fell into their lap? And yet Widows’ mood swings wildly between giddy and gritty, though always with the sense of a director in control of the story.
There are quite a few moving parts in this tale; one possible complaint is that there might be a few too many. Heist aside, there’s an intricate subplot about an upcoming election in a poor Chicago neighbourhood, with entrenched power on one side — Colin Farrell is a sixthgeneration Chicagoan with an inexplicable Irish accent; Robert Duvall plays his father — and an up-and-comer on the other, the aforementioned Brian Tyree Henry, with Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out) as his shifty lieutenant.
This civic battle could have almost been its own movie, so clearly are its participants drawn. Even Farrell’s assistant (Molly Kunz) feels like a fully realized character.
The best thing about Widows is that it finally provides Davis with a role worthy of her talents. Since her breakout in 2009’s Doubt, I’ve seen her take on throwaway parts in big-budget productions (Suicide Squad, Ender’s Game) and big roles that seemed predicated on her crying (Fences, The Help).
That’s not knocking those parts; The Help gave her a second Oscar nomination, Fences her first win. But Davis has been playing the crying game too long.