Men … and their messes
Steve McQueen’s new film Widows opens high above a modern Chicago, in a lofty lovers paradise of pearly white sheets, bodies in contact, and a feeling of time standing still. It’s a cunning and perplexing opening. It leads us to place of hope and optimism, and sets us up for the dark brutality to follow.
Passion gives way to the realities of the day, and Veronica (Viola Davis) and her husband Harry (Liam Neeson) part ways, she to her job as a school district administrator, and he to his gang’s heist of two million dollars.
By bedtime that night, the gang is dead, the money gone, and a looming debt in place that Veronica must pay or be killed herself. Such is the stark, and simple setup that leads us into a number of intertwined lives and into an outlandish and risky attempt to repay the debt and secure a number of futures.
In a parallel universe operate Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell) and Tom Mulligan (Robert Duvall). Past and hopefully future ward alderman, they are running a campaign for Jack’s election straight out of the Richard Daly playbook. Connecting these worlds in a particularly menacing manner is Jatemme Manning (Daniel Kaluuya), whose brother Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry) is also running for the same alderman seat, and who was just robbed of his entire campaign war chest of two million dollars.
A more or less standard thriller setup, but as is needed in a film called Widows, we focus on four new widows, from the funerals for their four mates to their eventual return to something like normalcy. Gillian Flynn’s script (adapted from the miniseries of the same name) gives us three female characters who are as similar at heart as they seem different on the surface. Some have children to parent, some have mothers to parent, but all have outward or inward scars from lives spent in and around domineering, deceitful, and absentee men, and who now must struggle to come into their own.
The film takes quite a while to establish these characters, and we’re made very well aware that their mates’ deaths have only increased, not created their daily difficulties. Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) is yanked out of her hectic but happy life as a mother and owner of a gift store, and Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), must finally learn to navigate her days without the help of one or another hyper-masculine dude to show her the way.
This focus on the women in the lives of powerful men owes a lot to Heat, Michael Mann’s 1995 L.A. noir that skillfully blends cops, robbers, and their frustrated, bewildered, powerless mates. But where Mann’s film expands the thriller to give it texture and depth, Widows attempts to use an inside-out approach to ask us whether we can ever have truly honest relationships.
As the widows, with some assistance, form their crew and move clumsily toward their own score, the film goes flying off in a few directions, and must hastily resolve itself in a climatic shootout and car chase. All the carefully crafted character studies fly out the window in a mad rush to an irritatingly predictable finish.
We’re left with grave and basic questions of plausibility, and wondering whether the thriller is the best place to explore these questions. The failure of Widows to use the thriller to explore relationships brings into sharper focus the great success of Jordan Peele’s Get Out to use the horror genre to explore race relations.
Lost in the fog are great performances by Viola Davis, who must don the face of increasingly hardened resoluteness, and Daniel Kaluuya, whose baby face turns into the face of single-minded cruelty. Also notable is the wasted performance of the great Robert Duvall, who’s saddled with a cartoon scribble of a character, and the always impressive Liam Neeson, who time and time again defines what it means to deliver an understated, yet intensely memorable performance.
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Widows opens today in Bay Area theaters.
