A super-charged crime epic that outguns Scorsese
After Hunger, Shame and 12 Years a Slave, Steve Mcqueen’s reputation as a film artist is carved in stone – untouchable, monumental, so hardhitting 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.
The tense but clenched opening of
Hunger has a prison guard checking under his car for concealed bombs. In Widows, one goes off within the first 10 minutes, flinging an exploding armoured van towards the camera. 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, the movie gets by on no more than electric confidence, 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), Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) and Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), none of them previously well-known 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.
This – along with two major sub-plots – is juggled hypnotically, with pacing and precision. If it sounds as though 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 mail-order bride – is tremendous.
The real star, though, is Mcqueen himself, whose steely grasp of stakes, pace and setting never falters: the ringleader of his own trusty crew, 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 to shoot a long dialogue scene 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 take note of the few blocks separating the projects from the gentrified district up the street, all to illustrate and ironise the subject of the conversation. Not that it’s a race, but his clever showmanship leaves Scorsese’s The Departed panting in the rear-view mirror. As swaggery crime epics go, it’s not even close.
Widows is showing at the London Film Festival until tomorrow (returns only: whatson.bfi.org.uk) and goes on general release in November