"Widows"

“Never thought I’d marry a white man – or a criminal”. So bitterly ponders Veronica Rawlings (Viola Davis) as she remembers her late husband Harry (Liam Neeson), whose violent death alongside his comrades in a botched robbery of crime lord Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry) has exploded the comfortable boundaries her social status once guaranteed. It’s a line that neatly summarizes the film’s themes and perspective thereon, an implicit acknowledgement of whiteness’s symbolic social power that dares to connect it to organized crime’s aspirational role in American cultural history.

Transposing Lynda LaPlante’s 1983 BBC miniseries of the same name to a 2008 Chicago on the verge of the election of one of its most illustrious sons, Steve Rodney McQueen’s Widows turns Veronica’s predicament and consequent leadership of an unlikely all-female gang of robbers into a metaphor for today’s intersecting identity politics. As she enlists working and lower-middle-class fellow widows Alice (Elisabeth Debicki) and Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) to do her bidding, her quest for personal liberation becomes a symbolic reparative crusade against white patriarchy that lays bare previously unexamined privileges she once enjoyed.

Consider her first meeting with the other women at a spa, and the business-like coldness with which she hands them money as if it were a toolset: her pacing is brusque, her expression stony, the imperiousness of her tone somehow amplified by the unmistakeable fear beneath it. Her tough businesswoman persona isn’t an act so much as a defence mechanism triggered by the social past these women reflect back at her. As Jamal Manning himself puts it to her so succinctly: “You’re nothing now. Welcome home.”

These class dynamics power the women’s interactions with a tension that quickly bleeds into peripheral plots surrounding alderman Jack Mulligan’s (Colin Farrell) reluctant efforts to maintain his family’s power in a predominantly black ward and Alice’s sugar-daddy arrangement with a dollar-store Christian Grey (Lukas Haas), to the point of achieving a kind of poetic rhythm as scenes and dialogue echo and build upon each other: when Veronica repeats Manning’s earlier putdown in a rare display of vulnerability after a physical altercation with Alice, their relationship progresses into a newfound solidarity bolstered by inter-class understanding; when Mulligan’s racist father (Robert Duvall) reminds his son their only purpose and duty as politicians is survival, his words evoke a dark reflection of Veronica with the added subtext of racial anxiety.

These touches give Widows a sly playfulness that McQueen’s filmography noticeably lacked until now. Approaching his political subjects with an art student’s eye for corporeality and texture, his previous films studied their pain and physical destruction to occasionally excessive degrees (Shame) but Widows opts to humanize its characters through pointed behavioural details rather than debasement. In doing so, he evidences a hitherto unsuspected talent for black comedy and political humour, best exemplified in a gun show scene during which Alice appeals to a female customer’s class guilt and white female solidarity by pretending to be an impoverished Russian illegal immigrant fleeing abuse (“You’ve always said a gun is a girl’s best friend” her daughter pipes up in a scathing punchline).

It’s perhaps unsurprising that McQueen would show such a canny understanding of our current divisions, but the satirical accuracy with which he anticipates both the hope and painful divisions that would characterize the Obama era comes as an especially welcome contrast to his previous propensity for occasional self-seriousness. Using the fatal police shooting of the Rawlings’ son (in front of a wall plastered with Obama posters no less!) as an instigator to the disaggregation of their marriage and lives, McQueen metaphorizes the 2008 election as an exposure of white patriarchal hegemony’s inherent, destructive fragility.

This is where McQueen’s visual artistry comes into play; from the opening shot of Harry’s playful pre-coital roar match-cutting into the gunfire of his fatal robbery, he visualizes a connection between virile masculine performance and toxic violence with an almost comic book-like panache that expresses his character’s mindset without versing into outright caricature. In a new twist on his familiar long-take conversations, he films Mulligan venting his white masculine anxieties (“have you ever slept with a black guy?”) to his campaign manager (Molly Kunz) from the car hood, both protagonists out of sight, as the camera films the housing projects he’s inherited for half the journey before slowly turning to the right to show his own affluent neighbourhood just as his manager urges him to man up. It’s a highly evocative, undercover journalism-inspired sequence that neatly distils the film’s themes of social determinism, neoliberal hypocrisy and patriarchal fears with a formal elegance and stylistic intelligence many modern such takes sorely lack.

These audiovisual highlighting of individual expressions and the politics that inform them make Widows feel alive in every frame, accentuated by McQueen’s use of reflections and motivated camera moves to express his characters’ fractured identities and teleguided social trajectories. None of that life, however, would come to be without the actors’ superb work: always a magnetic presence even in mediocre material, Viola Davis’s ability to convey an intricate network of feelings with the smallest shifts reaches a pinnacle untouched since Antwone Fisher. There’s a scene early in the film where Veronica talks to her driver (Garrett Hedlund) who offers to leave her employment due to her inability to keep affording his services. Look at Davis’s face; her face is a mask of sincere gratitude and sadness, yet there’s also a spark of grim inspiration behind them as she finds a solution that could help them both – at great potential cost to him. Not many actors can convey so much with so little.

Davis’s commanding performance is superbly complemented by her partners-in-crime – Elizabeth Debicki in particular stands out as an abused woman taking gradual ownership of herself – but it’s the small roles that make Widows’ denizens feel truly lived in. Be it Robert Duvall’s resentful patriarch struggling for what little power he has left, Adepero Oduye’s complex embodiment of capitalist identity politics (“I am an empowered female minority business owner!”) or Jon Bernthal’s chillingly casual abuser, every bit part is like a snapshot of a fully-lived life, isolating feelings and experiences in a precise here and now that better enhance their greater social relevance.

Widows is not without its flaws; the screenplay, credited to Steve Rodney McQueen and Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn, wraps subplots around each other in a way that occasionally suffocates individual characters (such as Jacki Weaver’s abusive mother and Brian Tyree Henry’s Jamal Manning, whose motivations are only explored on a surface level) and stunt certain plot developments. Still, McQueen’s perfect attunement to his characters’ emotions and movement coupled with his and Flynn’s political acumen make this socially perceptive thriller one of this year’s essential viewings.