No tears for this slick flick that’s issue-heavy
THOSE of you with long memories might recall the ITV mini-series Widows, which ran between 1983 and 1985 and was created by Lynda La Plante.
It was about a group of women whose husbands, all professional crooks, were killed during an armed robbery. So the women, despite their inexperience as criminals, took on the next job themselves.
Hardly anyone, as far as I’m aware, has been waiting for this rather implausible tale to get the silver-screen treatment, but here it is anyway, relocated to modernday Chicago.
Viola Davis plays Veronica Rawlins, whose husband Harry (Liam Neeson) was ringleader of a gang of thieves, and who decides, on being menaced by a mobster whose money Harry pinched, that she should use the heist plans he left behind. Colin Farrell— the second big Irish name to feature — plays a politician who unwittingly finds himself wrapped up in the widows’ plans.
Director Steve McQueen, who has certainly chosen a very different project from his last film, 2013’s Oscar-winning 12 Years A Slave, keeps it rolling along pretty watchably. He is aided by a tiptop cast which also includes Daniel Kaluuya, Elizabeth Debicki and the great Robert Duvall. The problem is that McQueen and his co-writer (the Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn) cram in too many issues — in fact there’s a whole series of Prime Time’s worth in there: racism, sexism, political corruption, domestic abuse, bad parenting, you name it.
This means that the central story doesn’t have enough room to breathe, and therefore never seems real. Still, you might enjoy suspending your disbelief.
O JULIET, NAKED is another far-fetched tale, Jesse Peretz’s adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel about a woman, Annie (Rose Byrne), shacked up with a music nerd, Duncan (Chris O’Dowd), who ends up forging an unlikely relationship with the object of the nerd’s all-consuming obsession. This is a reclusive American singer-songwriter called Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke) who hasn’t made music since his definitive album, Juliet, decades earlier. Byrne, an Australian actress
based in the US, is miscast. Quite apart from the over-rehearsed glottal stops, she is simply too distractingly beautiful to believe in as a faintly unhappy woman running a feeble museum in an obscure English seaside town, co-habiting with a genial dullard.
O’Dowd and Hawke struggle manfully with their roles, and with a script by Jim Taylor and the director’ s sister Evgenia
Peretz that conspicuously lacks Hornby’s own expertise with dialogue and scene-setting, not to mention the magic touch of producer Judd Apatow.
The film is at its (distinctly limited) best when it settles for being nothing more than a lightweight romcom. Alas, it strains too hard for poignancy, and makes ill-advised efforts to explore the nature of fandom and fame.