Widows

Widows is a different kind of heist movie, in that it is gritty and angry.  So many recent movies about people banning together to pull a job (such as the recent Ocean's Eight, which was also about women teaming up to perform a crime) are filled with glitz, laughs, and white-knuckle excitement.  Director and co-writer Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), along with fellow screenwriter Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl), has a lot to say about politics, the current state of Chicago, and how women and minorities are viewed by those with power and money.  The fact that they put in so much plot and involving characters in a film that runs just over two hours, and not make it feel overly crowded or rushed, is a sign that the audience is in good hands.

The movie has a simple yet ingenious concept, and one that I'm surprised we don't see very often, if at all.  It covers and unites the women who are left behind when their husbands all die in a botched robbery, try to pick up the pieces of their lives, and pull off a heist of their own when they become threatened.  At the center of it all is Veronica (a powerful Viola Davis), who is left struggling to understand the death of her husband, Harry Rawlings (Liam Neeson).  Throughout the film, we see flashes of their lives together, and how Veronica knew about her husband's dealings, but was never involved.  We are also introduced to two other women, Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) and Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), whose husbands were involved with Harry's crimes.  Linda is left with two kids to raise on her own, and Alice takes to selling her body for private sexual encounters with a man less than a month after her husband's death.

In the film's beautifully edited opening sequence, we cut back and forth between the three men performing the heist and how it went wrong, cross-cut with scenes of the morning before the crime, and the last time these women saw their husbands alive.  It does not play out how you might expect.  Harry and his men were professional criminals after all, and not exactly moral men.  We witness this with Alice, and how she has a black eye, clearly given to her by her husband the night before during an argument.  While all this is happening, we are also introduced to a political battle for the control of the future of Chicago between a candidate with a family history in politics, Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell), and his opponent, newcomer Jamal Manning (Bryan Tyree Henry).  It turns out that Manning had millions of illegal political funds to help his campaign stolen by Harry and his cohorts that night, and when the criminals went up in flames during a firefight, so did the money.

Manning sends out his violent cousin, Jatemme (Daniel Kaluuya from Get Out) to get the money back, no matter what the cost.  He starts following and threatening Veronica, giving her only one month to get the money that her husband stole from his family during the heist.  Veronica needs to get money, not just to save her own life, but to also get out of the shadow of her criminal husband, and so she teams up with Linda and Alice, along with a fourth woman who gets involved (Cynthia Erivo) to pull off a job that Harry had planned to do after stealing the Manning money, and could be worth $5 million.  With the money, the women can all be financially free to create their own lives and destinies.  This automatically raises the stakes, as unlike in most crime movies, the women involved are not doing it for fun, or to prove that they can (although that last part does play a small part).  It is about financial independence, and stepping away from their husbands who still haunt them after death.

What makes Widows excel is not just its gritty take on the heist movie formula, but also on how richly drawn the characters within it are.  The women at the center of the film always get to be unique identities.  They never once become a faceless group, and the screenplay and performances by Davis, Rodriguez and Debicki all make them stand out in different ways.  Even the side characters are developed strongly, especially Kaluuya as the film's lead heavy, who gets a memorable scene where he tortures someone in a bowling alley for information that is absolutely chilling to watch.  There is also a great supporting role for Robert Duvall as Mulligan's father, a long-time political figure and racist who yells at his son behind the scenes about letting a black person beat him in the polls.  He believes that his family should hold onto power in the city, and views his son as letting their name down when he struggles in the campaign.

But outside of the performances and the writing, this is just a technically winning film.  The editing is rock-solid, able to juggle these multiple characters and plotlines with the kind of ease we seldom see from Hollywood, and the subtle music score by Hans Zimmer underscores the action, rather than overpowers it.  It's brilliant how a lot of the movie doesn't even use a music score, and just lets many of the scenes play out, creating their own mood and atmosphere.  And as the tension increases with the heist getting closer, the movie knows how to increase the pressure, so that we are fully along for the ride that the filmmakers are providing the audience.  All of the revelations and ultimate outcomes feel earned, not manipulated by the screenplay.

Ordinarily, Widows would stand out just on its tone alone, and how it plays out so differently than you would expect a modern day heist film out of Hollywood.  But when you throw in everything else, it becomes a very special film, and one that hopefully will not get lost in the shuffle of big Holiday movies that have been released, and are about to.  This is really something to get excited about.

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