Widows review: Formidable cast, but characters lost in race for the big picture
WIDOWS ★★½
M, 128 minutes
Lynda La Plante is a crime writer venerated by many in the British police force for getting everything right.
Viola Davis is Veronica Rawlins in Widows.Credit:MERRICK MORTON
Her characters – Prime Suspect's Jane Tennison among them – are so well versed in the geography and sociology of Britain's criminal underclass that it's hard to imagine them functioning anywhere else. But director Steve McQueen and screenwriter Gillian Flynn, author of the bestseller Gone Girl, have given it a try.
They have re-made La Plante's 1983 classic TV series, Widows, plucking the storyline out of east London and setting it down in Chicago. They have also condensed it into two hours while mixing in a subplot about the chicanery at work in Chicago politics, which could possibly be meant as a general comment on Trump's America.
Jacki Weaver and Elizabeth Debicki in Widows.Credit:MERRICK MORTON
The basic plot goes this way. All the members of a gang led by crime boss Harry Rawlins (Liam Neeson) have been killed during a botched robbery and the millions they were stealing have been blown up with them. As a result, Harry's widow, Veronica (Viola Davis), is being threatened by a rival gangster, Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry), who claims that much of the money was his.
In desperation, she contacts the other gangsters' widows, Linda Perelli (Michelle Rodriguez) and Alice Gunner (Elizabeth Debicki), and persuades them they have to work together to extract themselves from the mess.
With the help of a set of plans left to her by Harry, they will take over the heist that the gang was preparing to carry out at the home of the Mulligans, a corrupt political family that has long dominated the city's South Side. And there's more. In the looming election, the Mulligan hopeful, Jack (Colin Farrell), is standing against Manning.
Apart from the basics, there is very little of La Plante left in all this. In her version, Veronica was called Dolly and played by Ann Mitchell, an actress who was equally at home in everything from Racine to Tennessee Williams. However, it was Dolly, along with a sustaining role in EastEnders, which made audiences fall for her. Tough, brave and sometimes funny in a strictly no-nonsense way, her Dolly was the quintessential den mother.
Daniel Kaluuya, left, and Brian Tyree Henry as gangster brothers Jatemme and Jamal Manning.Credit:AP
In contrast, Davis, another fine actress, plays Veronica as a well-dressed headmistress. She carps, she condescends and worst of all, she broods.
McQueen is wedded to close-ups so extreme that faces become landscapes with every follicle and pore magnified to the scale of a significant topographical feature. The aim is emotional intensity, but the result is weirdly disorienting, as if you've become lost in a land of giants.
They also slow down the action, which is important, because there's a lot of it. We have to be brought up to speed with Jack's relationship with his vicious old father, played by Rober Duvall, rejoicing in being able to spray venom all over the scenery, and we also become acquainted with the equally unwholesome Manning family dynamic. Jamal has a brother, Jatemme (Daniel Kaluuya), whose sadistic delight in his job as the family's standover man takes up a gratuitous amount of the action.
It means there's not nearly enough time left to get to know the widows themselves. Debicki is especially promising as the glamorous Alice, who's not nearly as flaky as she leads the others to believe. She's also responsible for the film's few flickers of humour, but she's never given the chance to make them spark into something brighter, which is particularly frustrating since Jacki Weaver, an expert when it comes to the deadpan line, is cast as her mother.
And what's the point of a heist movie if you're denied an opportunity to take part in the planning? In this case, it's so sketchy and haphazard it's impossible to believe they have any hope of success – a fact which doesn't exactly encourage empathy.
Thanks to La Plante's original, there is a plot twist to liven up the second half and McQueen does manage to inject suspense into the inevitable bumbling and stumbling that is part of the climax, but there's little exhilaration in witnessing the women's long overdue revenge on all the bullying men in their lives. That essential jolt of satisfaction is missing.
Sandra Hall is the author of two novels (A Thousand Small Wishes and Beyond the Break), two histories of the Australian television industry (Supertoy and Turning On, Turning Off) and Tabloid Man, a biography of Ezra Norton, the man who established Truth and The Daily Mirror. She was film critic at The Bulletin magazine prior to joining The Sydney Morning Herald in 1996.
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