Widows

photo courtesy of npr.com

SPOILER-FREE REVIEW

     Widows is directed by award-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen (12 Years A Slave) and written by McQueen and Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl, Sharp Objects). Viola Davis stars as Veronica Rawlings, whose husband Harry (Liam Neeson) runs a criminal enterprise. When Harry and his fellow thieves are killed after a job, the Manning family (Brian Tyree Henry, Daniel Kaluuya) expects Veronica to settle Harry’s debts. To repay the Mannings, Veronica enlists the other widows (Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Rodriguez, Carrie Coon) to pull off a heist of their own.

     Under the combined influence of McQueen and Flynn—two highly successful artists with distinctive styles—Widows is all kinds of exciting, stylish, and smart. Widows certainly isn’t the first heist thriller, and it’s not the first to feature women in lead roles (take this year’s Ocean’s 8, at least), but it still doesn’t feel quite like anything we’ve seen before.

photo courtesy of portlandmercury.com

     On a technical level, Widows hits every mark. McQueen brings ingenuity and a high degree of craftsmanship to the directing, which gives Widows a polished sheen that other movies in the genre typically lack. The actors each give fantastic, nuanced performances, sometimes in big, in-your-face roles that could easily become cartoonish; Davis, Debicki, Kaluuya, and Cynthia Erivo (who plays another conspirator) deserve particular notice. And for a movie with so much on its mind, Widows isn’t short on the action, either. McQueen keeps the thrills coming, and he keeps them classy, too.

     Widows can be fun, tense, and scary like any heist movie, but it also slows down and zooms in on character. As a result, the movie gives us quite a bit more emotion—real, complex emotion—than we’re used to seeing in this genre. The action/character balance feels something like a Marvel movie, but it’s much richer than your average superhero flick.

photo courtesy of variety.com

     It’s easy to care about these characters—and therefore easy to become invested in their edge-of-your-seat hijinks. These characters don’t feel like your typical heist heroes or heroines. That’s partly because, of course, they’re a group of women and many of them are women of color. (Widows makes significant steps in representation, fully imagining its characters points-of-view without demeaning them.) And it’s partly because of the characters’ motivations: they’re not in it for greed, revenge or glory. They (and especially Davis’s Veronica, who foregrounds the movie) fight just to scrape by, just to make ends meet and make it out alive. That makes them feel more realistic, lends them a hard-hitting edge, and gives the audience plenty of reason to cheer (which my theater did more than once).

Widows is rated R.

TRAILER

Watch the trailer here. 

photo courtesy of pavilioncinema.co.uk