Steve McQueen has outdone himself
‘Widows’ takes the already acclaimed director in a whole new direction,
After Hunger, Shame and 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen’s reputation as a film artist is carved in stone — untouchable, monumental, so hard-hitting it hurts. Without pedalling backwards in the slightest, Widows takes him in a whole new direction. It proves that there’s another McQueen who’s always been bursting to get out — the same one whose industry secret is that he’s always itched to make a James Bond movie, and now very possibly will. Remember the tense but clenched opening of Hunger, which had a prison guard checking under his car for concealed bombs? In Widows, they go off. It flings an exploding armoured van towards the camera within the first 10 minutes. Dramatic fragments, blasted our way, dance before us for the next two hours, rotating and glinting, colliding and connecting, like a puzzle in zero gravity. As a transition into flinty, supercharged genre filmmaking, it gets by on no more than electric confidence, high-fiving technical virtuosity, and a cast to die for. It’s very satisfying.
Of all sources, McQueen and his cowriter, Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn, have turned to a classic of ITV drama from 1983, the 12-part series of the same name created by Lynda La Plante, about the aftermath of a botched armed robbery. The setting has shifted to present-day Chicago, but the structure broadly remains. As before, three widows are left shell-shocked in the rubble — Veronica (Viola Davis), pictured right, Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) and Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), none of them wellknown to each other, or at all involved in their husbands’ criminal dealings.
Financially shafted, and in Veronica’s case threatened with violence by an unscrupulous local politician (Brian Tyree Henry), they join forces to pay him and each other off, following blueprints for a planned heist that Veronica’s husband (Liam Neeson) mysteriously bequeathed to her in a safe-deposit box.
These women, ultimately joined by a fourth in the shape of Cynthia Erivo’s getaway driver for hire, are thrown into crime only through hardship, or sheer circumstance. Far from sliding into Ocean’s 8-style cruise control, the film gets mileage out of their rabbit-in-the-headlights desperation. If there’s something strangely classical about this teaming of ruined wives, you could point all the way back to Euripides’ Trojan Women for its ancestry, albeit with more ululation and fewer point-blank killshots.
Debicki’s Alice faces a choice about whether to advance through the rest of her life as a high-price escort, which her mother (Jacki Weaver) actively proposes. She comes to the first clandestine meeting, arranged by Veronica in their husbands’ warehouse lair, dolled up in a spangly form-fitting dress, after a first date with a businessman called David (Lukas Haas), a loaded divorcé who tries, with reasonable if short-lived success, to make the financial part of their arrangement as noncreepy as possible.
The other key subplot is about an impending mayoral election pitting Henry’s furious Jamal Manning, angling to become the ward’s first African-American alderman, against Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell), scion of political royalty, who has a shady association with Neeson’s Harry.
As a prominent poster of Bellini’s opera I Capuleti e i Montecchi in Jack’s office helpfully suggests, these feuding factions are meant to remind us of two such households, more alike this time in skulduggery than dignity. Exhibit A: Jamal’s brother Jatemme (a brilliantly callous Daniel Kaluuya) is a gum-chewing, sharpsuited enforcer, the 2018 equivalent of a hoodlum from Chicago’s bad old days. McQueen clearly gets a kick out of using Kaluuya as such a skulking terror: he trots him out like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, leaving a trail of dead. Meanwhile, Jack’s father is played by Robert Duvall, who drops the Nword in his second scene and hardly improves from there. Farrell, always solid as a suit you can’t trust, is on fire, and has one particularly stellar face-toface speech softly disowning his father, who’s become such a racist embarrassment he’s toxic even for a crooked politico to carry.
All of this is juggled hypnotically, with pacing and precision that wouldn’t disgrace two first-class episodes of The Wire —a further influence I suspect McQueen and Flynn would merrily acknowledge. If it sounds like Davis has been at all left out in these manoeuvres, she hasn’t: her character, more screwed over than anyone, is not just prime victim but prime mover, an aggrieved mastermind with a white terrier called Olivia — who tips her off to at least one severe shock — rarely far from her bosom. As she goes along, her performance stealthily dominates, without preventing anyone else in the ensemble from seizing their moments to shine.
Rodriguez, debatably, brings less novelty or shading to her role, but Debicki — at one point convincingly posing as a Polish mailorder bride — is tremendous, weighing up the options in her scenes with the lessgross-than-you-expect Haas character.
The real star, though, is McQueen, whose steely grasp of stakes, pace and setting never falters: he has the dream team of editor Joe Walker, cinematographer Sean Bobbitt and composer Hans Zimmer to do his very precise bidding.
Few but McQueen would have the nerve or inspiration to shoot a long dialogue in one take from outside the moving car where it’s happening, to remind us pointedly of the minor character who’s driving, and to note the few blocks separating the projects from the genteel district up the street, all to illustrate the subject of the conversation. Not that it’s a race, but his clever showmanship leaves Scorsese’s The Departed in the shade as swaggery crime epics go. It’s not even close.