Widows: Film Review

Widows: Film Review

Cast: Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Robert Duvall, Colin Farrell, Liam Neeson, Daniel Kaluuya, Cynthia Erivo
Director: Steve McQueen

Ripped from a Lynda LaPlante UK TV series from the mid-80s, the contemporary US update of Widows is startling in its recreation of the power of money, the corruption of wealth, and the power of women to rise above what's been dealt to them.

A searing Viola Davis plays Veronica, the wife of known career criminal Harry Rawlins (Neeson, mixing tenderness and harshness in flashbacks) who finds herself widowed after a heist goes wrong.

Visited by the local crime boss and informed that Harry had stolen $2 million from him, Veronica's given a month to return the cash - or pay the consequences.

So, in order to escape the hand she's been unwillingly and unwittingly dealt, Veronica goes to the also-widowed women of Harry's associates Linda and Alice (Rodriguez and Debicki respectively) to enlist them into the job.

Widows is the antithesis to Ocean's 8 - and so much the better for it, trading darkness and depth for Oceans' sleight of hand and smoke-and-mirrors routine.

Director Steve McQueen, who brought such pain and pathos to the likes of Hunger and 12 Years A Slave, gives himself more of a contemporary pat setting with Chicago's seedy underbelly, politicking and dirty money and deceit forming the backbone of a sickeningly compelling movie.

It begins with a heist gone wrong, before weaving complex threads of destroyed relationships, power, and of desperate lives trying to reset and survive.

Set against the politicking of Colin Farrell's incumbent alderman wanting to stay in power, along with the exposure of all that entails, and how deep the corruption goes, Widows could collapse under the weight of its darker themes.

But along with McQueen's flashy director touches, and anchored by a gripping central turn from Davis, the pieces of this at-times slow-moving chess board trundle inexorably and inevitably to their tragic ends.

Yet, it's also empowering (and a breakthrough role) for Debicki's Alice, a beaten wife whose life has seen her repeatedly slapped around by different generations; and for Davis, whose commanding presence on screen brings nuance and uncertainty to the woman who was happy to enjoy the benefits of her husband's ill-gotten gains but negotiates murky waters when it comes to availing herself of any guilt.

It helps that McQueen's underpinned his film (from Gone Girl's Gillian Flynn's script) with none of the usual tropes of a heist and grounded it in a humanity that gives it an emotional core to cling to - certainly, in its actual heist sequence, it's nothing short of electrifying, urgent and riveting, a set piece par excellence that's swift, brutal and suspenseful.

Essentially Davis and Debicki's time to shine, Widows is a powerfully pared back film and engrossing drama that hides layers behind its themes of societal corruption, political heft, and anger at a system.

It's being touted for awards, and quite frankly, much like some of the power of Denzel Washington's Fences, Widows is a film that you can't fire enough superlatives at.