Movie Breakdown: Widows (Noah)
Pre-Screening Stance:
Whatever Steve McQueen (12 Years A Slave) made next was going to be on the top of my list. The fact that he decided to do an all lady heist film co-written by Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn is like icing the cake with distilled anticipation.
Post-Screening Ramble:
Widows walks a strange line between a straight heist film and a feminist deconstruction of the genre. Gillian Flynn’s script finds a diverse socio-economic group of women suddenly thrust into the the worst kind of debt when their bank robbing husbands don’t come home. The writing is steeped heavily in the twists and turns of the true crime genre and to McQueen’s credit, Widows is less a genre-subversion and more his heady, cerebral reinterpretation of it. And as much as it is a heist flick, McQueen clearly doesn’t care about the actual heist flick tropes. Yes, Widows is a movie about a bunch of women who have to form a gang to pull off a heist and all of the training sequences and such that come along with it, but that’s a singular thread in a big knot of a film. And it isn’t to say that this film isn’t super entertaining or truly enjoyable to watch, because it is, it’s more to say that one should temper their expectations in terms of seeing a heist flick. The actual heist at the end is purposefully anticlimactic, with genre elements needed to fully flesh out the plots and twists left to the side so McQueen can bend the film to a darker, more introspective place. It’s a film that feels jarring at times but never enough to usurp the fact that it whips along layering story after story on top until they come crashing down into one big beautiful pile. It’s also a film where every performance in it sparkles (from Daniel Kaluuya’s gleeful menace to Jackie Weaver’s brief maternal vitriol to Elizabeth Debicki’s slow intellectual emergence). McQueen is, regardless of the occasionally uneven thematic moment, a true craftsmen with his visuals, his sound design and his editing. This is a great movie, it’s just not a perfect one. And honestly, it’s all the better for it.
One Last Thought:
The long take in the gym with the two rappers and Daniel Kaluuya is maybe my favorite shot I’ve seen all year. Yes, The Haunting of Hill House has an episode concocted from five tracking shots, but not a one can hold a candle to the energetic crackle McQueen gives to this moment.
