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On stage at the Toronto International Film Festival, just before the premiere of "Widows," his debut film since "12 Years a Slave" (five years ago), director Steve McQueen emphasized the importance of create movies. the world of real and recognizable human beings. Many of us would support that feeling, but that's not what you expect from someone who presents a movie. The genre has existed since the early 1950s and the pattern has always been this: when characters come together to plan and execute a flight, we can see the quiet desperation of their lives, we can taste a hint of ash. cynical "reality", but it really is about the intelligence of the crime itself. Burglary movies take place in a caper movie bubble, and it's a pleasure, one way or the other.
But "Widows," as McQueen suggested, is another story. It is a film in which three women, whose husbands have all perished in a robbery, have banded together to steal $ 5 million, even though none of them has any experience of criminal behavior. And the network of disastrous circumstances that lead them to create this system without any installation – that's the dramatic heart of the film. "Widows", adapted from a British television drama first broadcast in 1983, features a script co-written by McQueen and novelist and screenwriter Gillian Flynn ("Gone Girl", "Sharp Objects"), which presents a dark vision scenario and lurking ordinary lives intermingling with the roar of street brutality, the politics of local machines and half a dozen other forms of daily corruption.
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The film, which takes place in the contemporary city of Chicago, begins with Veronica Rawlins (Viola Davis) and her husband, Harry (Liam Neeson), who pretends to be a big crook in bed. The simple fact that a mixed marriage has been presented is always surprising to see that in a mainstream film, one can not help but invest this passionate pair into a certain romantic idealism. But it's fast enough. Their first moments are interspersed with a turbulent run, seen from an escape van with slamming back doors, which ends with Harry's shooting and his crew by the police, until the van arrives. explodes in flames, killing all the men on board. So much for domestic happiness.
Veronica is suddenly a widow. More than that, she is a widow and her husband owed her $ 2 million. That's what he stole from Jamal Manning (Henry Bryan Tyree), who claims to be his alderman from his parish, but he's also a crook who asks Veronica to liquidate his property, including the penthouse. sprawling in which she lives but does not have, to repay him.
The imposing performance of Viola Davis rooted this scenario in frigid fear and shock. Veronica can not believe what happened to her (overnight, she lost everything) and her eyes tell you that she knows everything will get worse. She continues to have backtracks in her life with Harry, including the one where they make fun of Nina Simone while singing "Wild Is the Wind". Difficult not to notice that Davis, her hair wide, would be an ideal actress to represent Simone. She has that kind of strength.
In "Widows", the power of Davis' performance is that she lets you know in each scene that Veronica lives in a world of betrayal. She is the victim of bad luck and scammers who gave her a month to find an impossible sum. But the way McQueen stages the film is also that she is a victim of a society that no longer cares about us. It's every man – every woman – for herself. The dialogue in "Widows" is thick with salacious insults, and McQueen creates a hypnotic panorama of daily corruption that looks less like a crime than in a Robert Altman film or a Richard Price novel.
For a while, it works brilliantly. The first half of "Widows" is a moment of playful threat after another, be it Jamal Manning who arrives at Veronica's apartment or his rogue brother, Jatemme, played by Daniel Kaluuya, a scary sociopath . "Get Out" – stabbing a man in a wheelchair to get the information he wants, or Jack Mulligan (Colin Farell), the politician who tries to keep the siege of the alderman who has been in his family for 60 years, manipulating his constituents and the media with a show called Minority Woman Own Work, or Jack's father, Tom (Robert Duvall), toxicly explaining the racist currents of their political reign.
Harry, at death, left Veronica a notebook containing the plan of a flight he had failed to commit. As soon as she takes a look, Veronica knows she will realize it as if her life depended on it. The wild presence of Davis tells you.
Veronica enlisted her two fellow criminal widows because they are natural allies, and she has no one to turn to. Alice (Elizabath Debicki), a tall woman whose husband was a drummer, takes the bad advice of her mother (Jackie Weaver) and sells herself on a website for "companions", which brings her to connect with a real estate player (Lukas Haas) who thinks everything is a transaction. Meanwhile, Linda (Michelle Rodriguez), a sacred firecracker, discovers that her husband was playing with rent money in her clothing store, so she has nothing to lose.
"Widows" tells the story of a robbery by three women (with a fourth, a hairdresser who played with Cynthia Erivo's impenetrable moxie, as a pilot), but she's as far from "Ocean's 8" as you could get. She is a feminist based on reality, that is, not really. The film has at least one twist that will shock you, and it is galvanizing to see Davis capture the kind of role she does not have to play. The dialogue has the cliché of spiritual danger that has become Gillian Flynn's hallmark.
Yet "Widows", a very original and entertaining variation of the burglary film, is not a run. Theft is more violent than clever, which is part of the problem. It also unfolds in the truest sense, rather than in the Hollywood world lighter than the air of Rube Goldberg's thrift store. Yet, given the intelligence of a movie "Widows", the way the burglary connects to everything that happened to him has something to chance. Many of the film's dramatic scenes are so striking that it's almost as if "Widows" would have been a better movie. without break it. (In this case, however, he would not have passed as a commercial thriller.)
The strongest aspect of "Widows" is the way the film allows us – and keeps us – to root its desperate heroines. They went beyond the simple goal of having fun (subtext of almost all burglary films); they are less concerned with coercion than with mere survival. "Widows" presents this as a kind of deliverance. Still, you wonder what the movie would have looked like it had been a little more irresponsible.
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