Steve McQueen (2018)

In his Sight & Sound (October 2018) piece ‘The Class Ceiling’, Danny Leigh deplored the social narrowness of present-day British cinema, in terms of both the subject matter of films and the personnel making and appearing in them.  ‘As for working-class writers and directors with their own distinctive voice …,’ wrote Leigh, ‘well, let’s have a headcount.  Lynne Ramsay?  Yann Demange?  Steve McQueen?  All making films in America …’  In the case of Steve McQueen, whose last film was 12 Years a Slave five years ago, the real pity is that he’s taking advantage of the supposedly greater range of opportunities available across the Atlantic by making a movie like Widows.

This is a reworking by McQueen and Gillian (Gone Girl) Flynn of the 1983 ITV drama serial of the same name, written by Lynda LaPlante, in which the wives of three professional criminals, whose husbands are killed in an armed robbery that goes wrong, decide to carry out the same heist themselves and do so successfully.  McQueen’s Widows is a shrewdly calculated package.  As Eric Kohn of IndieWire says (as a compliment), ‘The movie engages with topics as complex as sexism, police brutality, and interracial marriage, but it still delivers on the car chases and gunplay’.   The marketing of the film as feminist is fair enough, even though it’s hardly ground-breaking in that sense:  the plot is essentially unchanged from LaPlante’s thirty-five-year-old original.  Although one of the original TV widows was played by an actress of colour (Eva Mottley), the racial diversity of the film’s cast is a more substantial advance.  Fashionable inventions for the big-screen Widows include a corrupt political dynasty fighting to retain electoral power in the South Side district of Chicago where the action takes place.

The character of the senior widow has been reshaped so that the audience can root for her to pull off the robbery safe in the knowledge that she’s also a cut above.  (The reshaping may also be designed to help keep Widows‘ feminist pretensions intact.)  In the TV version of Widows, Ann Mitchell’s East Ender Dolly Rawlins was a loyal, hard-as-nails criminal consort.  Her cinema counterpart Veronica Rawlings (Viola Davis) is in love with her armed-robber husband Harry (Liam Neeson) but says at one point, ‘I never thought I’d marry a white man and a criminal’, to reassure us that she’s well aware that both these things are infra dig.  Veronica’s background is in teaching.  When she meets the aged political boss Tom Mulligan (Robert Duvall), she reminds him they’ve met once before, when she was a teachers’ union representative.  Veronica eventually donates a large part of her share of the heist proceeds to endow a school library, to be named in memory of her late son, the innocent victim of a white police officer’s bullet.

Steve McQueen exploits Viola Davis’s talents in an attempt to give his flashy film depth and even nobility.   The attempt is only partly successful.  McQueen means Veronica to be distinctive but Davis is incongruous.  Widows showcases her powerhouse emotionality (including the now trademark expression, as proof of intense feeling, not just of tears but of a snot stream too).  Davis’s authority, natural truthfulness and emotive strength as an actress are seductive for a while but counterproductive well before the film is over:  they expose its mechanics and priorities.  This is most apparent when Veronica finds out that Harry didn’t die in the robbery – that he’s still alive and in a relationship with another woman (Carrie Coon), whose baby is Harry’s child.  The impact Davis has made in earlier, less pivotal scenes draws attention to McQueen’s refusal to give this discovery the dramatic attention it needs – he’s not going to hold up the plot to dwell on character.  As a result, Davis conveys only that Veronica is upset:  she has no opportunity to describe the complex realisation that the man she loved and thought was dead is still alive, and that he has betrayed her.

Viola Davis’s presence and effect in Widows brings to mind her award-winning performance on television in How to Get Away with Murder – a ‘show’ I found unwatchable for more than a couple of episodes because a show was so evidently all it amounted to.  Davis has spoken publicly of her determination, after The Help (2011), not to play any more maidservants.  This is understandable, to say the least, but I hope she’s not going to overcompensate by opting to play strong, independent women even when the role is poorly conceived and doesn’t suit her.

The best supporting work in Widows comes from Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo and Daniel Kaluuya.  Debicki is Alice, one of the other widows, who has turned to escort work to keep herself.  There’s a moment quite early on when Alice swaggers out of a shop, chomping a huge sandwich, that doesn’t bode well:  McQueen seems keen to present her as a kickass heroine cartoonishly – something which Debicki’s exceptional height makes it easier to do.  A lot of what follows in her portrait of Alice is more imaginatively droll.  Erivo, whose character and playing are agreeably straightforward, is Belle, a beautician who babysits for the other widow Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) and who joins the heist team as driver after Veronica’s loyal chauffeur (Garret Dillahunt) is murdered.  Kaluuya is Jatemme, the psychopathic brother and enforcer of the local crime boss (Brian Tyree Henry) who is running for political office against Tom Mulligan’s son Jack (Colin Farrell).  The role of Jatemme is thin but Kaluuya is witty even just standing in silent menace, as he’s required repeatedly to do.

The dramatic shallowness of Widows is instanced by a showdown dialogue between the Mulligans – the physically frail but still unscrupulous oldster vs the shyster son-who’ll-never-be-the-bastard-his-father-was.  The upper hand in the argument switches back and forth with almost comical frequency:  Robert Duvall and Colin Farrell have a job to keep up.  More interesting – as an illustration of how the screenplay’s political savvy operates – is a sequence that, until it delivers its punchline, is tonally atypical of the film – that is, quiet.   Researching the site of the planned robbery, Linda finds out the name of the architect who designed the building and visits this woman’s home.  The architect’s husband (Philip Rayburn Smith) opens the door and lets Linda in (improbably, in the circumstances, but that’s beside the point).  It turns out the architect has recently died; when Linda makes it obvious she didn’t know this, the husband realises she’s not bona fide and gets angry – but not for long.  Within a few screen seconds, this meeting of widow and widower has the latter making a clumsy pass after Linda:  he is, after all, a white male.  The action is inexplicable in terms of the personality that Philip Rayburn Smith, in a skilful cameo, has already suggested.  It’s almost inevitable in view of the way Widows presses audience buttons.

Crackerjack editing by Joe Walker ensures that the action sequences are properly dynamic.    Sean Bobbitt’s lighting sometimes gives the regularly violent proceedings an almost apocalyptic look, which may be meant to remind us that Steve McQueen is a cinema artist but is also partly responsible for the movie’s heavy, inflated feel.  McQueen chose the right man to write the score:  the combination of thudding high energy and portentousness, just what you expect from Hans Zimmer, is an accurate expression of the movie’s split personality.  But the ‘serious’ side of Zimmer’s music also contributes to the ponderous quality of Widows – which seems to go on much longer than the 128 minutes that it actually runs.   The film currently has a 91% ‘fresh’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes, where the capsule ‘Critics Consensus’ describes it as ‘a heist thriller that mixes popcorn entertainment with a message …’.  The fundamental message, beneath the politically cute one, is that the people who made the film think they know what makes box-office sense; yet although it’s already recouped nearly the whole of its $42m budget, the picture has not been the smash that the hype and the critical reception might have predicted.  It’s something of a relief, given the pretty sophisticated commercial planning behind Widows, that some viewers have decided to take their popcorn elsewhere.

13 November 2018