Widows directed by Steve McQueen. Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox.
When Steve McQueen is directing, you know his art-house sensibilities mean he is going to do at least one thing that you don’t expect – like show Michael Fassbender’s penis, or shoot Michael Fassbender sitting at a table smoking cigarettes and talking for 15 minutes without cutting away. In this film, that thing happens right away by setting up four male co-stars getting ready to embark on a heist, and then immediately killing all of them in a fiery explosion. Drawing on the Drew Barrymore in Scream school of thought, he doesn’t hold back from wasting the big-name male talent, like Liam Neeson and John Bernthal, right up front.
This sets the stage for our female leads, with their own big-names like Viola Davis and Michelle Rodriguez, to usurp genre convention, take over the film and pull off their own heist. It doesn’t go exactly as planned, but neither does this movie. I’m not sure what this film is supposed to be – a feminist revenge fantasy? A kind of parochial interpretation of structural racism and corruption in big city politics? A fun excuse for Tom Hagen to play a cranky old man? A clever narrative reshuffling?
I guess it tries to be all of those things, and it hits the mark to varying degrees. It wants to be a social commentary heist film with inverted gender roles, but it’s not the greatest heist film and the social commentary is pretty shallow. Inverting the gender roles and killing off all your male leads in the opening act is gutsy, and I think it works well. But I do kind of wish the heist element had been executed a bit more sharply.
McQueen tries to paint a realistic portrait of the anguish and the obstacles his female leads are struggling under which means they never become fully formed badass heroes in the typical mold. I’m pretty sure that was the point – this film, after all, is about subverting conventions – but there is something to be said for the sheer escapist pleasure of watching a good heist film, where the robbers pull off an entertainingly convoluted robbery. Had it leaned more fully into a full-throated revenge fantasy, rather than giving us medium-sized but more realistic triumphs, it might have landed better for me.
As far as Robert Duvall as a cranky old racist? Nailed it.