I’ll admit to confusion when I learned that Steve McQueen – a filmmaker whose choices in projects lean more toward the conceptual and abstract – was going to make Widows, an obvious genre piece. That confusion ended once I actually saw the film, and I was left feeling very foolish for questioning it. Widows is a heist film centered on women, betrayed in various ways by the men who were supposed to protect them, left to fend for themselves when a dangerous criminal decides to collect on a much-needed debt. These women are lead by Viola Davis, America’s most important film and television star, an actress of such incredible talent and impact, whose reputation may be second only to Meryl Streep.

I single out Davis because, like Streep, her casting gives any project a generous dose of prestige, even if it’s something as frivolous as Shonda Rhymes’ How To Get Away With Murder. She stands at the top of Widows’ food chain, but McQueen actually directs an incredible ensemble of characters and performances, all filled sordid pasts and complex relationships with authority and the powers that be. This includes another former prestige actor turned action powerhouse Liam Neeson, who plays Harry Rawlings, a high-stakes thief married to Davis’ Veronica. When Harry’s latest job goes bad, and he ends up dead in a car explosion with his three partners, it turns Veronica’s world completely upside down – and she begins to learn how deep Harry’s troubles lie.

The job-gone-wrong was a calculated robbery of Jamaal Manning (Atlanta‘s Bryan Tyree Henry), a criminal kingpin who hopes to gain legitimacy by getting elected as alderman of Chicago’s 18th ward. Jamaal doesn’t know why Harry and his men stole his money, but that doesn’t stop him from coming to Veronica and demanding that she find the money to keep his campaign financially afloat. With nowhere to turn, Veronica turns to the wives of the other men who died in the robbery. This includes Linda (Michelle Rodriguez), a small business owner who finds that business seized after her husband’s death, and Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), a regal blonde who was her late’s husband trophy and occasional punching bag. The women, each desperate and saddled with their husbands’ baggage, decide to pull off Harry’s next planned heist to pay off their debts and come out from under the thumb of the men who wish them harm.

The film’s script is written by McQueen and Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn – adapted from a 80’s television show created by crime author Lynda La Plante – and brilliantly foregrounds the film’s plot against the fraught political climate of Chicago. Manning’s ambition in politics is meant to hide his true, more violent business. This comes in the form of his brother, Jatemme (a wonderfully wicked Daniel Kaluuya), who works mostly as Jamaal’s enforcer who wields fierce intimidation and actual brutality in equal measure. The Mannings aspire to be like Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell), Jamaal’s political opponent and the youngest member of a family with supreme political outreach in the 18th ward. Enflamed in oncoming scandals involving embezzlement and corruption, Jack hopes his family name can win him the election over Jamaal’s surging campaign.

Jack and Jamaal are two sides of the same criminal coin, only reputation (and skin color) separate the perception of their behavior. Throughout Widows, men treat the people they see transactionally. This is the system that keeps Veronica, Linda and Alice in the backseat of their husband’s professional lives. It’s also that hubris that allows the women to fly under the radar as they decide to steal the very money that these men claim is rightfully theirs. When they’re joined by Belle (Cynthia Erivo), a struggling single mother working multiple jobs, they have all the tools and people needed to pull off the heist. Their planning is novice, occasionally crude and sloppy, and at times they need to get assistance form the very men they hope to disenfranchise with the money.

The narrative ambition of Widows feels both typical of McQueen and still immensely impressive. McQueen and Flynn take great pains to show how the entirety of Chicago’s social and economic infrastructure is implicated in its moral fraudulence. Everything from small business owners to clergymen have a hand in the machine that keeps only a particular kind of person in power, and that kind of person hardly ever includes women, people of color or the poor. More than anything, Widows is a testament to the precision and monumental intelligence of McQueen as a film director. The way in which he controls the ways your eyes look upon the images he crafts is unmatched, crafting set pieces of remarkable delicacy and beauty while still containing the utmost intensity.

Along with Kore-eda’s Shoplifters, Widows may be the best ensemble of 2018, but unlike Kore-eda’s film, which has a collection of performances working together to create the generous family atmosphere, McQueen isolates the performances in Widows, with scenes focusing mostly on individual actors than their collaboration. Even the scenes highlighting multiple performances emphasize the conflict between them. Widows is a world of people looking out for themselves, a point best illustrated through the character of Tom Mulligan (a dastardly Robert Duvall), Jack’s irascible father whose blatant racism is shielded by his past political accomplishments. Jack wants to distance himself from Tom, but only for cosmetic reasons – Jack’s abhorrent use of epithets is too politically costly. Even the bond of father and son isn’t enough to keep the characters in Widows together.

McQueen has never seen the benefits of subtlety, and the calling cards of genre filmmaking allows him to indulge in more blatant pieces of symbolism, which he pulls off with great aplomb. Widows is a film filled with a varied collection of targets, but McQueen is always smart enough to keep the story front and center. With all its winking glances at troubled American iconography, this is still mostly a story about women fighting against a system made to keep them feeling inconsequential. The film’s distaste for the male-dominated bureaucracies is palpable, and McQueen instills the film with the necessary energy to tear it all down.

 

Directed by Steve McQueen