Widows

Widows is an exhausting 2018 heist movie set in Chicago and featuring an impressive A-list Hollywood cast.  The film is directed by Steve McQueen, the British film-maker responsible for 12 Years a Slave and other prestige productions.  McQueen and his screenwriter, Gillian Flynn, are nothing if not ambitious and the movie is packed with trendy subject matter -- there are takes on Black Lives Matter, current immigration policy, gun violence, and Chicago's notorious political corruption.  In fact, I think there's simply too many characters, too many subplots, and too many intricate narrative twists (some of them downright implausible) for one movie.  The picture rockets around Chicago, showing us Black preachers preaching, various bars and bowling alleys, upscale private clubs, political rallies, steam baths and slum tenements, gun shows, a car auction, and a hair salon that is a front for criminal activity.  Of course, there are dingy and cavernous warehouses, deluxe apartments on Lake Shore Avenue and mansions in Hyde Park with elevated trains clanging sonorously in the night.  Other than Michael Mann's Thief, I don't know any other movie so tightly rooted in the Windy City.  It's all very convincing with outstanding acting, good atmospheric camerawork and crisp editing.  The problem with the film is that it tries too hard -- it aspires to thematic profundity on subjects like race and political corruption, topical issues that impede and immensely complicate the simple, lurid genre pleasures that we expect from a well-designed heist movie.  The film deserved a bigger and better audience when it was released -- I don't think it's a wholly successful movie, but it's epic in its own way.


Widows begins in media res -- a robbery has gone wrong and the crooks are fleeing pursuing cops.  From the outset, McQueen establishes his ambitions.  The exciting cops and robbers stuff is confounded by flashback sex scenes between Liam Neeson (the beleagured crime boss) and his African-American wife, Veronica (Viola Davis).  The robbers hide in one of those generic Chicago warehouses full of combustible materials and, when they switch vehicles to flee, are confronted by about 200 SWAT team cops who riddle their escape van with machine-gun bullets and create an incendiary inferno.  The four robbers killed in the warehouse have left the titular widows.  No sooner have the wives buried the fragmentary and charred remains of their husbands, then, thugs start calling on the four grief-stricken women.  It turns out that the robbery depleted the funds of a corrupt Black politician who is locked in an electoral race with the Irish politician Jack Mulligan.  The African-American kleptocrat wants his money back and begins harassing the widows.  The women, who have not earlier known one another, form an alliance and, in fact, plot to get back the money from where it is hidden in Mulligan's Hyde Park campaign headquarters.  The movie is quick and fearless in its narration and, only later, does the viewer grasp that the picture is replete with coincidences and holes in the plot.  The film develops as a pretty standard heist movie, complete with sequences involving preparations for the robbery, reconnaissance and the like.  The movie's only deviation from standard operating procedure is that the criminals are all women -- "No one thinks we have the balls to pull this off," Viola Davis says.  The four women can be categorized as brains, beauty, brawn, and desperation.  Viola Davis, Liam Neeson's widow, devises the plan using a notebook that her late husband has left for her -- Liam Neeson is too important an actor to be killed off in the first scene and so he makes little cameo appearances throughout the picture, sometimes in flashbacks or as an imagined mentor to the female gang led by his wife.  His continued presence in the film perturbs it and most of the plotting problems result from his involvement in the picture. Beauty is played by an actress named Elizabeth Debicki, someone whom I have not seen before and who makes an indelible impression in this film.  Brawn is supplied by Cynthia Envio, playing a hyper-athletic hair salon operator -- she's the one member of the gang who is not recently widowed.  (This is for reasons too complex to explain here and that would constitute spoilers as well.)  Desperation is played by Michelle Rodriguez, the hapless owner of a shop that her late husband's gambling has put in peril.  There are a host of other actors -- Robert Duvall in a showy turn as a bigoted old-time Chicago pol and Carrie Coon as the one widow who won't participate in the heist. It looks to me like Sally Struthers (uncredited) plays the part of the Polish girl's mother -- she blithely encourages her beautiful, if odd-looking daughter (she's wraith pale and about seven feet tall) to become a call-girl.  Lots of incidental characters get roughed-up, tortured, or killed.  There are many impressive Black actors playing gangsters and politicians in the movie -- I recognized them but can't tell you their names.  Because McQueen is busy keeping so many balls in the air, he neglects some of the genre pleasures implicit in a heist movie -- the contract with the viewer is that we should get to see the woman playing the "muscle" role exercise her brawn and the "beauty" should get to seduce someone.  McQueen's too sophisticated for this sort of plotting and, so, perversely, I think, he denies the audience some elements of the genre that we expect and, even, yearn for.  The raid on the Hyde Park mansion is pretty much underwhelming, the big reveal and climax is completely unsurprising, although staged in a clever way, and the film is so complex that some of its final scenes are inadvertently confusing.   At the end of the movie, the heroines now much enriched have to figure out how to divide up their booty.  Viola Davis' Veronica Rawlings says:  "I want to donate a million dollars for a library wing dedicated to Maurice."  This is the last line of the movie.  It had me scratching my head:   "Who the hell is Maurice?"  Ultimately, I figured it out, but only a half-hour after the movie was over.