Widows: Steve McQueen

In some alternate reality, Steve McQueen’s Widows would be a tight, schlocky 85-minute 70s thriller, helmed by some second-string director with a fourth-string budget, destined for a crepuscular half-life of midnight revivals and wistful blog retrospectives. Instead, it’s a languid, measured 10s prestige noir with murderer’s row of Hollywood A-listers in front of and behind the camera. It might masquerade as a heist film about a group of widows pulling off a job after their husbands are all killed in a robbery-gone-wrong, but this is a steely-eyed interrogation of a city. That city: Chicago, microcosm of America—den of racial disharmony, economic disparity, police brutality, and less-than-good people forced to do worse-than-bad things. McQueen has stated that the film was his dream project for years, and there are many scenes where he unleashes his inner adolescent, conjuring scenes of pulpy excess and brutality. (Usually these come at the hands of Daniel Kaluuya as a ruthless mob enforcer with an dizzying repertoire of ways to humiliate, torture, and kill targets. A scene where he executes two lazy henchman while making them beatbox is bowel-drainingly chilling.) But McQueen has the instincts of a painter, not a clockmaker, and effective thrillers need the talents of the latter, not the former. And while he may mimic Michael Mann’s need to excavate the psychological interiors of his players, McQueen has none of Mann’s equally obsessive drive to construct gripping set-pieces. The central heist is treated like a bit of unfinished business late in the third act, taking no more than five minutes in which time one character is shot, two killed, and four betrayed. But unlike other directors who would’ve made the suddenness and brutality of the sting some nihilistic point about fate or human nature—consider the anti-climactic yet Shakespearean denouement of Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006)—the heist feels brief because McQueen appears to have cared little about it. But his unflinching examinations of gender and race makes us forgive this, especially considering his fastidious craftsmanship. Few directors know better where to put the camera and when and how to move it; and one tracking shot of a bickering politician’s car driving the one mile between desiccated projects and a palatial planned community on the same street is worth any number of thrilling heist scenes by lesser directors.

Rating: 7/10