MOVIES
BY M O L LY T E M P L E T O N
VIOLA DAVIS AND ELIZABETH DEBICKI
WIDOWS
Four women team up to pay a debt in Steve McQueen’s heist flick
ithin the first few minutes of Widows, a heist goes terribly awry. You’ll see
this coming. It isn’t the job that you’re here to see, but the one that sets
everything in motion.
It’s this disaster that seems to destroy the happy existence of Veronica
(Viola Davis) and Harry (Liam Neeson) — no more morning snuggles in
their luxe apartment, which seems cold and austere when Veronica is home alone. (At least
she still has their perfect dog.)
But Steve McQueen’s film is a study in layers, and no scene — no line of dialogue — in
Widows is just one thing. Within the framework of a taut genre film, McQueen and cowriter
Gillian Flynn (adapting the 1983 TV miniseries written by Lynda La Plante) carefully trace
lines of power and inequity.
The familiar beats of a heist — the plan, the challenges, the execution — underscore pointed
commentary about options: Who has more or fewer of them, and how and why that is.
Against the backdrop of a changing Chicago, Veronica finds herself adrift when the
men to whom Harry owed money come calling. Harry may be gone, but the money that
vanished with him was owed to would-be alderman Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry).
Jamal needs that dough to fund his campaign against the established Mulligan family, who
regard the position as essentially theirs to inherit.
Veronica doesn’t have Jamal’s $2 million. But she does have Harry’s notebook, which
contains the plans for his next job. To pull off that job, she enlists fellow widows Alice
W
(Elizabeth Debicki), whose dead abusive husband followed in the footsteps of her abusive
mother (Jacki Weaver, in a tiny part, is electric), and Linda (Michelle Rodriguez), whose
dead husband gambled away their ill-gotten gains. Linda brings on the fourth member of
their team, Belle (Cynthia Erivo), who works multiple jobs to support her daughter.
Widows neatly weaves the political rivalry of Manning and Mulligan into the story of
the four women, making a compelling argument for the way abuses and imbalances of
power shape a relationship, or a neighborhood, or a city, or the world. The movie is tightly
packed and sometimes relies on narrative shorthand to build its characters, but the cast
translates that shorthand into affecting performances across the board, from Davis and
her stunning embodiment of Veronica’s grief-stricken gravitas all the way down to brief
appearances by Carrie Coon and Jon Michael Hill.
The twists and turns in Widows’ plot are deeply satisfying, but it’s not simply the film’s
clever construction that makes it so compelling; it’s McQueen and Flynn’s willingness to
give a heist film depth and resonance. There’s real pain in Davis’s performance, real fear in
Debicki’s, and there’s never really any guarantee that everything is going to turn out okay
in the end.
Men have failed these women — failed to see them as fully human, to understand their
pain, to recognize their potential. But the widows see all these things in each other as they,
to borrow a famous line, do everything their husbands did, just backwards and in heels
(metaphorically speaking). ■
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