Film
WIDOWS (15) THE WIFE (15)
Last month’s film was a remake of a remake of a remake; this month’s is just a remake. Are there no new ideas in Hollywood? The simple answer to that would be no.
Widows first appeared on British TV in the early 1980s as a six-part drama series written by Lynda La Plante. It was her first big hit and it was of a time when Euston Films, maker of Minder and The Sweeney, could do no wrong. Ann Mitchell played Dolly Rawlings, wife of a dead crim, who finds that he has left her less than nothing, other than his notebook, with details of one brilliant crime as yet uncommitted. She finds out that the widows of the dead crim’s team of dead crims are equally stuffed financially. Together they decide that the only way they can survive is to pull off this dastardly crime, despite having no criminal experience or inclinations whatsoever. It was a great piece, full of good character work from a cast you hadn’t previously heard of, and a huge amount of Mission Impossible- like detail about the crime. In short, they were terrified, but they did it.
A mere 35 years later comes Steve Mcqueen’s reimagining of the show, transferred to Chicago for the usual financial reasons. Dolly Rawlings is now Veronica Rawlings, a far more educated, middle-class black woman played by Viola Davis. Liam Neeson is her deceased husband, and her team is completed by Michelle Rodriguez (token Hispanic), an extraordinarily tall blonde woman (who always wears heels) and a stroppy young black woman with serious biceps. This is Mcqueen’s first thriller; his previous films have been grim tales of social realism, such as the scarcely watchable 12 Years A Slave. And so is this, really. Mcqueen and his fellow screenwriter, Gillian Flynn, have added a huge, unwieldy subplot about Chicago politics, in which everyone is corrupt and Robert Duvall, still furious at 87, is both corrupt and racist. This ups the complexity of the film, but at what a cost!
The character work is minimal, and Mcqueen simply isn’t interested in the final crime: it passes in a handful of minutes, with no sense of the women’s fear or lack of criminal nous. What you get is a so-called ‘woman’s film’ that isn’t female at all.
Davis is as terrific as she always is, but the excellence of her performance only partially conceals that her part has been grievously underwritten. Does she have no friends? No family? Really? Who is she exactly? We never discover. The violence, by the way, is often unspeakable. It’s the sort of film that makes you want to go home and have a long, hot bath, to feel yourself becoming human again.
From Widows to The Wife. Glenn Close plays the wife of a Nobel Prizewinning writer, played with an enormous beard by Jonathan Pryce. As they fly into Stockholm to receive the award, she seems thoroughly cheesed off with everything, and we move very slowly to a reveal that you will have guessed before you came into the cinema. But it’s well done.
Pryce huffs and puffs and blows the house down, but Close is stunningly good, as is a young actress called Annie Starke (Close’s real-life daughter) as her younger self. The last 20 minutes are superb, and the final moment, as Close looks into the camera and you know exactly how the rest of her life will pan out, is judderingly good. No bath needed for this one – or even a shower.