Widows review: Steve McQueen pulls off one hell of a job with this heist thriller

Charlotte O'Sullivan2 November 2018

At one point in Steve McQueen’s Chicago-set thriller, an old-school politician, Tom Mulligan (Robert Duvall), starts frothing at the mouth. Why? Because he’s been told that his son, Jack (Colin Farrell), seeking glory in a local election, has fired the white campaign manager and hired a “black guy, a British guy”.

It’s the word “British” that makes the scene special. McQueen has written himself into a narrative about race, gender and roots, all but saying, “Yeah, I’m black and British! Suck it up!”

The Oscar-winning director’s latest film is based on Lynda La Plante’s Eighties TV series, in which four desperate Cockney women plan a robbery after their criminal husbands are blown to smithereens.

McQueen keeps all the pulpy goodness. As in the original, his protagonist not only masterminds the robbery but has a tragic backstory and to-die-for clothes. Veronica (Viola Davis) doesn’t care that the other women in the gang, Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) and Belle (Cynthia Erivo), act like schoolgirls and mock her stern-teacher voice. She doesn’t even flinch when addressed as a “cold, old, bitch”. Most importantly, she refuses to lie down and die when she discovers that she’s been gaslit by someone close to home.

Sorry for your loss: Viola Davis as gang leader Veronica and Colin Farrell as corrupt politician Jack in Widows 

That said, McQueen and co-writer Gillian Flynn have widened the scope of the story with the racism of Chicago’s police force responsible for a crucial death. As the action moves backwards and forwards in time, it becomes clear that if our heroine has been betrayed so have all the poor people in this ward (a predominantly black area). The powers-that-be are gaslighting the whole community.

The result is simultaneously sophisticated, tender, chuckle-worthy and exciting (you’ll forget you have lungs during the heist). It also makes you want to dash out and buy a record player: few things are more magnificently moody than Nina Simone’s voice unfurling from a turntable.

Davis, meanwhile, is perfect, especially when saying absolutely nothing. Over the course of the movie she reacts to four hurts. Each hurt seems to have its own temperature and the tears she sheds at the end give off nuclear heat. On second viewing, the performance seems even more extraordinary; with the twists out of the way the layers can be truly appreciated. I’m now glad Davis didn’t get an Oscar for her lovely turn in The Help (as a maid, saved by the interventions of a white, middle-class liberal). Winning for Widows would be so much more of a coup.

The film also deserves to snag award nominations for its supporting players. Debicki’s Alice is pushed by her mother into working as an escort for a site hilariously called “Start Dating Generous Men”. The character looks like Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour but taller (there are basketball stars who’d look runty next to Alice). She’s so beautiful. As is Erivo’s Belle (who boasts a completely different body type). The point is, their beauty doesn’t define them and the actresses have a ball, as they make us aware of that awesome truth.

McQueen loves his starry cast (Liam Neeson and Get Out’s Daniel Kaluuya also shine in small but significant parts). That said, he pays as much attention to places as iconic faces. While Jack argues with his PA in a speeding car, McQueen’s camera absorbs the bleak shabbiness of the streets. Then he slides past the windscreen, so as to take in the emotionally frozen face of the black chauffeur. None of this is self-indulgently arty. It’s practical. By the time the car pulls up to Jack’s plush offices, we’ve covered so much ground.

Sequences filmed inside a series of churches also prove eerily crisp; every crucifix counts. Clearly McQueen’s interest in martyrs (first explored in Hunger) is still bubbling away. How do you change the world without putting your flesh at risk? Is salvation only possible in the modern world if you’re prepared to kill?

In Jane Campion’s In the Cut (2003) a woman learns to shoot straight and feels radically empowered. In a sly move, McQueen and Flynn show a little girl at a gun fair eyeing up the merchandise with her mother. She’s been taught that handguns are a girl’s best friend. Which certainly floats the idea that feminism, albeit unintentionally, may be fuelling America’s firearm fetish.

By the way, there’s no actual site called Start Dating Generous Men. But it is based on SeekingArrangement.com, which is a real-life thing that claims to feature “more beautiful sugar babies per sugar daddy, and more diamond sugar daddies, than any other dating website”.

In Widows you meet men who treat women like toys. It’s weird, the film’s all-too-plausible universe leaves you sick to your stomach, yet the talent on display makes you feel as if you’re being showered with gifts. Make a date with McQueen. He’s a truly generous man.

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