Yes But

Widows a film by Steve McQueen.  With Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Carrie Coon, Liam Neeson.  ****1/2

Widows is a movie that is deeply satisfying emotionally and aesthetically without—as far as I’m concerned—making a hell of a lot of sense.[1]  Veronica (Viola Davis) is the wife of a career criminal named Harry Rawlings (Liam Neeson), though she purposely knows nothing about his work.  As the movie opens, we see a montage of sex between this couple alternating with an elaborate crime that Harry is pulling off, during the course of which he is blown to kingdom come.  No chance he could have survived what happens.  A thuggish and extremely threatening man named Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry) comes to Veronica and informs her that her husband has stolen two million dollars from him, and that he wants it back.  The money could not possibly have survived the explosion.  Veronica’s situation seems hopeless.

But there is a consolation prize.  Harry’s driver has a small envelope that Harry said to give to his wife if anything happened to him, and she goes to a safe deposit box and finds—not two million dollars in cash, unfortunately—but a journal that details every heist that Harry ever pulled off, also his next job, which stands to bring in five million bucks.  Apparently Harry was an extremely methodical and cerebral crook, and not only planned every job down to the last detail, but actually kept a journal about it.  (Ira Progoff would be so proud!)  So naturally—she can’t go to the police, since her husband was a crook—Veronica decides to find the women whose husbands were on the heist with Harry, and pull off this final job herself.  She can pay off Jamal and the women can split a clear profit of three million bucks.  What a great idea!

I have a few questions, if I could interrupt my review for a moment.  Why are there so many movies about previously innocent people pulling off elaborate heists?  People who have never held a gun or done a violent thing in their lives suddenly become tough-assed criminals and shoot guns as if they’ve been doing it forever.  Is it because every member of the audience—including a seventy-year-old duffer like me, with an enlarged prostate and a bad shoulder and arthritis in every joint—is sitting there imagining he too could go out and buy a gun and kick some ass and make five million bucks?  Why would a great actress like Viola Davis—whose role in Fences was one of the most moving things I’ve ever seen on a screen—want to make such a movie?  Why would the director of 12 Years a Slave want to direct it?

I guess I’m not supposed to ask these questions—the more money the better, right?—but they do come to mind.  Why do great actors want to portray superheroes from comic books (I’m not naming names; you know who you are)?  Also (one final question): is there anyone in the audience who watches this movie thinking these women won’t succeed in this incredibly difficult heist?  All kinds of terrible things will happen, but they’ll wind up with three million dollars profit.  Yay!  The good guys won.  Except that they’re now violent criminals, and a couple of them are killers.

The direction of the movie was marvelous.  Viola Davis’ performance was superb, along with any number of others.  But why do people want to make a movie that’s so fucking preposterous?

Back to my review.  The movie is set in Chicago, always a hotbed of violence and corruption, and Jamal is not only a successful criminal (he had two million hard-earned bucks, after all), he’s also running for alderman, against a white man who is terribly corrupt and part of a politically dynastic family named, what else, Mulligan (Colin Farrell).  Ordinarily, of course, we’d be rooting for Jamal to defeat the young Mulligan in the election, but maybe not after we see the way he manhandles Veronica’s dog, to say nothing of Veronica.  Or when his brother tortures a helpless guy in a wheelchair.  Things are not black and white in this movie, except that they are: race is a constant undercurrent.  It’s no accident that the movie begins with an elaborate French kiss between Viola Davis and Liam Neeson, one of the whitest men who ever lived.  The whole movie is somehow, in some subtle unstated way, about race.

The cast of widows seems to have been chosen to have wide audience appeal.  There is a black woman (Davis), a Latina (Michelle Rodriguez), and a beautiful tall white woman, who happens to be Polish American (Elizabeth Debicki).  They apparently all have to pull off this heist or they’ll wind up with bullets in their heads—at least according to the very bossy and rather bitchy Veronica—though the other women haven’t been threatened, and I for one don’t understand how Jamal would know who they are.

There is yet another widow who chose not to get involved (how come she didn’t get a bullet in her head?).  There is also a surprise roughly two-thirds of the way through the movie that turns the whole thing on its ear.  I wouldn’t think of revealing it, though it was a real shocker.  We’re also shocked, at least I was, when we find out where the five million dollars are that the women are going to steal, though that fact lends a nice symmetry to things.  But when I started to ask myself questions about who Harry was working for, and why he had stolen the two million bucks, and what the plan was from there, and how this all fit into some large scheme, I couldn’t figure it all out.  My wife thought she knew, but she couldn’t answer my many questions at the restaurant after the movie ended.  Neither of us could get to the bottom of it, even after a beer, which usually brings out our deepest intuitive faculties.

I don’t mean to sound grouchy.  My wife and I loved this movie; it was great to watch these diverse women work together and get all tough-assed and pull off this heist.  There was a satisfying feeling at the end that the good guys had won and the really bad guys had lost (and were dead, most of them).  And if I really want to understand the plot, the movie is based on a novel, and I could read that.  Do I look like I’m running off to find it?

I do have one more (aesthetic) question.  In the midst of this convoluted plot, there is the fact that Harry and Veronica had a great looking and perfectly innocent teenage son who was killed when he was stopped by police and seemed to be reaching for something in the glove compartment.  That incident called up many other such incidents that have been part of the political discourse in recent years.  But wasn’t it kind of a cheap trick, to bring that mammoth issue into a movie about women pulling off a heist, when it had nothing to do with the central plot?  And wouldn’t it have been a more interesting movie, and more worthy of their talents, if McQueen and Neeson and Davis had made a movie about just that?  That one incident, without anyone being a criminal?

I don’t mean to spoil all the fun.  I’m just asking.

[1] The IMDb Trivia section mentions that the first cut of the movie was three hours long.  Maybe that version would have been more coherent.  Steve McQueen apparently decided on a tight quick movie rather than an entirely coherent one.  Good decision.