Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars
Bottom Line: Effective social commentary disguised as a heist movie. Great acting and a smooth running storyline.
I have a confession to make. The opening scene of “Widows” made me very uncomfortable and I don’t know why. It features Veronica (Viola Davis) and Harry (Liam Neeson) laying in bed playing tongue hockey for a decent amount of time. In that time, my mind went from yay, interracial relationship in a movie, to ok, we get it, move along please, to THE HORROR MAKE IT STOP! I’m not generally squeamish about public displays of affection so I don’t really know what it was. I like to think it’s because no one should be subjected to the Lovecraftian shapes Liam Neeson’s tongue made, but I am not sure. The rest of the movie features legitimately loving and touching moments between the two that make you go dawwww, but this one part…ick.
The basic premise is this: Harry is a heist artist who is meticulous, but on one of his heists, things go wrong and he and his gang all end up getting killed by the police and the money they stole gets destroyed. The money belongs to a well known and well connected gang leader, Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry) who wants his money back and sees Harry’s wife Veronica’s comfy lifestyle and demands that she make him whole again. Veronica knew nothing about Harry’s misdeeds and has none of the money to perform restitution, but she does find Harry’s heist notebook with future heist plans and she recruits the other heist widows to steal the money from a Chicago Alderman named Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell) who also came by the money by illegal means and who is currently running for reelection and his main opponent is the aforementioned gang leader.
The plot sounds convoluted, but it works and its main purpose is to bring together these disparate groups to focus on some fairly insightful and artistic social commentary. For instance, there is this brilliant one minute soliloquy where Jack is just complaining about life as he gets into his chauffeured car after a campaign event in a severely economically depressed section of his Ward. As Jack talks, the camera is focused across the front hood of the car and the economics of the neighborhood quickly change until he disembarks on his block with mansions galore on it just a minute later. Stuff like that is peppered throughout the film. Then there are the similar but quite different plights of the female protagonists. Veronica finds that the life she had and the love she knew were all a lie. Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) finds her shop repossessed by people her husband owed money to. Alice (Elizabeth Debicki) was in an abusive relationship and is left with nothing after her husband dies. Besides the heist story undertones, these are issues that affect many women and they are stories that should be told and are told in this film.
“Widows” is directed by Steve McQueen, who has been around for a while now, but has only really been given a chance to shine recently. You may remember him from such films as the brilliant “Twelve Years a Slave”. He has a couple more films under his belt, but I’ve not seen either. I would think that he’d be directing a film a year at this point, but it doesn’t look like he has anything new lined up yet. I wonder why. Don’t wait for his next film to come out, though, go see “Widows” and definitely rent “Twelve Years a Slave”!