Taking on every rat in Chicago’s dark underworld — and winning
I can’t speak for all of them, but Chicagoans will watch the terrific and unexpectedly soulful crime drama “Widows” one way, while everybody else experiences a separate but related movie.
Either way, it works, and never in ways you can entirely anticipate. Director Steve McQueen’s first feature since winning the Academy Award for “12 Years a Slave,” this is commercial pulp fiction of a high order, splendidly acted right down to the smallest bit roles.
More sensitive, imageminded locals may resent the snake pit of corruption on view in “Widows,” packed as it is with slithering politicians, rampant gun violence, schemers, criminals and sociopaths. Whatever; it’s a free country, more or less.
But not since “The Fugitive” has a thriller relished the city’s cinematic possibilities so effectively. This tightly packed adaptation of the 1983 British miniseries (already Americanized in an earlier, Boston-set version) has the visual sense to exploit many different and relatively underfilmed Chicago locations, vividly. And screenwriter Gillian Flynn, McQueen’s co-writer, hands a prodigious ensemble cast led by Viola Davis every opportunity to humanize the behavior, brutal or otherwise.
Described one way, “Widows” sounds like a rougher version of “Ocean’s 8.” In the intercut opening sequences, we see Veronica (Davis) in bed with her husband, Harry (Liam Neeson), in a pristine, white-walled condo on Lake Michigan. A kiss smashes into a flash-forward of screaming tires and a robbery gone wrong.
Harry is a thief. He and his crew steal $2 million from Manning (Brian Tyree Henry), an 18th Ward operator running for alderman against the long-established, Daley-esque Mulligan family. The heist goes south in a hurry; Harry and his men lie dead in the first few minutes of “Widows,” leaving their widows to deal with the fallout.
The silky, threatening Manning wants his money back, and he gives Veronica a tight deadline to come up with it, or else. Working from detailed plans for another job left behind by Harry, Veronica must bury her grief long enough to get her own gang together. Elizabeth Debicki plays the Polish-American widow, Alice, one of the movie’s few lighthearted flourishes; Michelle Rodriguez is Linda, who doesn’t miss her criminal husband any more than Alice misses hers.
A crucial fourth member emerges in hairdresser Belle, portrayed by the riveting Cynthia Erivo, whose innate toughness is established in a single shot of her running for her bus. Flynn, author of “Gone Girl” and “Sharp Objects,” creates with McQueen a densely layered city of very few angels. The Mulligans, insecure son and racist, powerful father, are played by Colin Farrell and Robert Duvall. Theirs is not a happy family, but then, they don’t really deserve happiness.
There are moments in “Widows” when you struggle to make certain narrative connections, mostly to do with money and graft and who got what from which constituent. But Flynn’s tart wit and McQueen’s sleek visual assurance keep the movie from settling for plot alone. As Manning’s thug brother, Daniel Kaluuya is visibly thrilled to trade his lowkey observer’s role in “Get Out” for a stone-cold killer. He doesn’t overdo it, or underdo it; he just does it, brilliantly.
“Widows” doesn’t imagine a documentary version of Chicago; it’s more about creating a contemporary mythic Chicago, where the underworld the world. It’s one of the year’s highlights in any genre.