Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox.
There’s a scene in Steve McQueen’s Widows that I can’t stop thinking about—my pick for the most troubling scene in the movie. (Stop here if you care about spoilers.)
Like the police shooting it depicts, the scene arrives suddenly, unexpectedly. In an otherwise thrilling—even compassionate—movie, this becomes a galling point of no return.
A young, mixed-race man is driving in Chicago. It’s an expensive car, his father’s—a case of police profiling waiting to happen. The young man, who’s on the phone with his father, gets pulled over. For arbitrary reasons that, even if they were explained, wouldn’t make his death seem justified, the young man reaches toward the glove compartment—a threatening move, in the eyes of the cop, who promptly shoots him dead. Just beyond his body, on a nearby wall, we can see rows and rows of Shepard Fairey Obama posters crowding the screen, the hope and change they bespeak suddenly, viciously ringing hollow.
You don’t really see this death coming. Before it, and even after, the young man is not really a character, but a memory: the son of a married couple played by Viola Davis and Liam Neeson, who we also think is dead. The moment takes you aback—which is undoubtedly intentional—though it’s also meant to come off as a fact of black life, particularly black life in Chicago. It’s also, unabashedly, a juicy bit of backstory. From this moment, you’re supposed to understand that the marriage between Davis and Neeson’s characters was already fractured, long before Neeson’s crook got killed and Davis’s wife got stuck holding the bills.
The film is being advertised as an Oscar-season prestige jaunt about the unlikely bonds forged by a quartet of badass women. But as the police shooting makes clear—and as many of the complex social dynamics in the movie bear out—Widows is really a study of difference. The movie stars Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, and Cynthia Erivo as women of disparate identities, leading vastly different lives, with professions and homelives that run the gamut. One works at a beauty parlor. One works in city politics—specifically, in education. None, strictly speaking, are crooks.
But three of them have married into crime: Davis, Rodriguez, and Debicki all have husbands killed in a heist gone wrong. With its twisty menage of suspenseful plots and stacked cast of A-team actorly talent, Widows is a movie about marriage and women, as well as a good popcorn movie, a breath of fresh air from a director whose three features to date—on the imprisonment of Bobby Sands, sex addiction, and American chattel slavery—are all a little too taxing, even punishing, to be your casual night out at the theater.
But Widows wouldn’t be a McQueen movie without some bigger picture—something bitter to pair with the crime genre’s inherently satisfying sweet. Widows attempts to tackle the social and political fractures embodied by its setting—specifically, Chicago’s predominantly black 18th Ward, where an election for alderman is playing out in the background of the widows’ plight. One of the candidates, Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell), comes from a dynasty of local politicians; his father has held this seat for decades. The other, Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry), is an upstart from the community. As a black resident of the ward, he’s seen the Mulligans’ corruption up close. He wants to put an end to it—though he’s not above corruption of his own.
The film recalls the ambitiously broad, gritty city thrillers of the 1970s, 80s, and even 90s; I kept thinking of Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City and Q & A, sweeping, low-key crime entertainments in which ground-level political smarts get blown out with all-encompassing, novelistic breadth. Movies like these, and The French Connection and The Conversation and The Parallax View, often strike the same nerve, making local politics and power structures in New York or D.C. feel eerily, paranoically larger than life and nationally relevant. The crimes undertaken to fight or brandish this power garner a frightening symbolism in this way. And the movies themselves get their hands dirty in this symbolism.
Widows shares those ambitions. It’s a crime movie that’s “more than” a crime movie—not because it’s being “elevated” by some show-off auteur, but rather because crime, as a social force, already encompasses everything: race and class, justice and injustice, gender.
In most of those regards, Widows is onto something. You can feel co-writer Gillian Flynn’s steady, witty hand in the group dynamics between the women, for example, which McQueen doesn’t entirely seem to get. “Often, in movies, women hate each other,” he told The Independent. “The fact that these people come together, that they respect each other—it’s very bold and very powerful.”
In fact, the least exciting scenes in this movie are the ones where the women are working in perfect harmony. The best expose how some of these women have greater means than the others, or that they come from abusive environments in which, having always been second-guessed, they’ve got something to prove. Flynn is particularly good at writing knotty, intelligent drama that doesn’t belittle her subjects; subtext is what makes it not only delicious, but smart, to see Davis barking orders at Rodriguez and Debicki, or to see Erivo barking back.
With gender, Widows wields a scalpel. Race, however, is apparently not befitting of such subtlety. When the topic rears its head in an explicit way, you feel McQueen popping into the room with a doctor’s prescription pad in tow, ready to tell America what its problem is. (McQueen is British.)
Scenes like that police shooting are characteristic of a reach for political and social relevance that I wish movies like this wouldn’t undertake. I wish Widows understood that this story was already relevant—that these women, and the class-defined lives they lead, and the massive efforts undertaken to subvert the limits of those lives were substantive enough, without a distracting grab for topicality. The police shooting feels cheaper than everything else in the movie, and undercooked. Though we see a few too many shots of Davis confronting her own imposing image in mirrors and reflections, what’s at stake in losing one’s black son to police violence is only vaguely depicted.
Frankly, it’s nonsense. A late twist in Widows is that Neeson—heretofore understood to be a dead outlaw—is, in fact, alive, and in bed with the cops. Certainly that’s one way to make a statement about the Chicago police—by all accounts a troubled authority, as investigations into their interrogation methods have proven. But would the father of a black son who was murdered by cops later collaborate with those same policemen? Only if he’s racist. But is the implication here that Neeson’s character is racist, or that the loss of his son in any way informs his broader scheme? Is the death of his son borne out in his actions—or in his wife’s?
Without a compelling psychological argument—since it seems to have little impact on either parent’s psyche—the death here is about as specifically rendered as any other dead-child trope in movies: it gives the parents a reason to look bummed out for two hours. The specific implications of a death like this one—beyond vague hand-waving at Chicago as a site of racialized violence—are lost on the movie, left unexplored.
The flashback is an attempt to beef up the film’s politics that is, itself, deadeningly apolitical. Racial injustice is a serious business. And while you can’t argue that Widows doesn’t take it seriously, there’s a cynicism to this scene’s blunt obviousness that’s irritating in a movie that otherwise shows it can be smart, sensitive, and novel in its politics.
Didactic art has its place; Spike Lee wouldn’t be the master of the form that he is if that weren’t so. But McQueen and Flynn show their hand in dispiriting ways here. Police shootings are, as their own movie suggests, a fact of black life. They’re too much for a subplot—and too much, ultimately, for this movie.
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