Widows

Widows, one of the year’s most best movies, is a high stakes heist picture on Chicago’s meanest streets, but what’s so good about it is that it’s almost an “anti-heist” heist movie. By that I mean that its characters—led by a herculean Viola Davis as a Chicago teachers union administrator who falls into dangerous territory after her thief of a husband (Liam Neeson) is killed in a botched job—are vividly drawn and given rich social and economic contexts as drivers of their “no way out” decisions.

Davis leads a team of desperate women, so well played by Michelle Rodriguez, an eye-opening Elizabeth Debicki (The Great Gatsby) and Broadway star Cynthia Erivo—to pull off an unlikely $2 million heist that their survival all but necessitates. Add to this cocktail a thorny vision of Chicago as a place of high-rolling, corrupt politicians, dirty aldermen and menacing, underbelly thugs, all scripted with pointed cynicism (and a few signature surprises) by Gillian Flynn and co-writer McQueen updating from a 1983 British television series, and you get a movie of distinct pleasures, noble and seedy.

In a ripping good ensemble, Robert Duvall, Colin Farrell, Daniel Kaluuya and the great Kevin J. O’Connor are all given meaty turns, and the Chicago locations are spot-on authentic. It’s telling that McQueen saves the heist for the last stretches of the film’s 130-minute running time; he’s more fascinated building the worlds, and the women. And does he ever.

Picture opens in a moment of quiet intimacy between married couple and one to be quickly shattered. Veronica (Davis) and Harry (Neeson) hold and kiss each other tenderly in bed in their upscale, Lake Shore Drive condo, a mature couple in lived-in love. But as with everything in this surprising film, nothing is what it seems.

By trade, Harry leads a gang of thieves, including Florek (Jon Bernthal at his most thuggish), Carlos (Manual Garcia-Rulfo) and Jimmy (Coburn Goss).  In the picture’s opener the gang pulls off a robbery only to be cornered and promptly annihilated by a hail of bullets from Chicago cops.

Turns out that dead Harry has stolen a cool $2 million, and if Veronica can’t produce it in thirty days she’ll be killed. But where is a teacher’s union rep going to find that kind of money? Armed with a heist blueprint Harry left behind, she enlists the help of the reluctant other windows to track down the location and safe.

Veronica is joined in mourning by abused wife and second-generation Polish Alice (Debicki); store proprietor and mother Linda (Rodriguez), who is quickly foreclosed upon; and Amanda (Gone Girl‘s Carrie Coon), left alone to care for an infant. Complicating their instantly dire economic situations are some truly sinister peripherals, including a pair of corrupt aldermen competing for a south side ward.

Irish Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell, effective) thinks he’s got the election in the bag with a family name and father (Robert Duvall) who preceded him in office. In one of the movie’s genius sequences, McQueen shoots an extended single take from the hood of Mulligan’s limo as it passes through the wasteland of his would-be ward, camera facing the tinted windshield while Farrell, unseen inside, unloads a scathing monologue. While the car movies from the disenfranchised community to his affluent, gated home, it’s quite a statement—he’ll rule the ward if he wins, but he certainly would never live there.

Mulligan’s electoral opponent is two-bit mobster named Jamal Manning (an excellent Brian Tyree Henry), who dispatches his sadistic nephew (Daniel Kaluuya) to make his win happen by any means necessary. Later, this means finding out what the women are up to and, in a scene of blunt brutality, shaking down a wheelchair-ridden O’Connor. Kaluuya, doing an about-face from his Oscar-nominated Get Out performance, walks on a knife’s edge here, always ready to explode in sudden violence.

Davis, as good as always, is on fire here, clinging to her furry puppy (figuring importantly into a late plot surprise) and driving the operation with little to no idea what she’s doing. Yet she forges ahead, even while her mind is firmly in the past. Gradually, a picture of what we thought was a happy marriage emerges as a haunted one.

One of the lynchpins of the movie is how little the women knew their husbands, or rather, wanted to know, and it proves to their detriment. No questions were asked—and now the sins of the husbands come a knocking.

A shockingly good Elizabeth Debicki (The Great Gatsby) trembles at her husband’s hand but later will learn to buy, and fire, a Glock in one of the movie’s great scenes. The Australian actress, who can turn on a perfect Polish accent, has a doozy of a mother here played by Jackie Weaver (Animal Kingdom) pushing her daughter into online prostitution as a means of survival. This trail leads to a jerk of a real estate magnate (Lucas Haas) who becomes her sort-of boyfriend, and a smart handful of scenes where they two navigate the real nature of their relationship.

The usually hard-edged Rodriguez, in a turnabout of a role for her, is a beleaguered, west side, suddenly single mom left with next to nothing, despised by her extended family. The actress, known for her toughness, plays the maternal here with equal conviction. And Erivo’s Belle, a new arrival to the group, is another single mom who works as a hairdresser by day and on-call babysitter at night. A Tony winner for Broadway’s The Color Purple, she presents an athletic, ferocious fourth wheel whose street smarts are invaluable to the operation’s success.

The climactic heist is no splashy caper on the order of Oceans 8, but rather a need driven by women to survive on their own ingenuity after depending on their husbands, one of whom is referred to as an “evil bastard,” which could be said about most of the men in their lives and sordid network.

There’s so much to love in this movie, including its authentic streets of Chicago locations, high-toned to low-rent shot by Sean Bobbitt as if he’s a local; it feels that real. You’ll be shocked, surprised and enervated by where the movies goes—and you won’t move for over two hours until a final scene where one character finally manages to offer another a genuine smile.

Widows smartly sits at the intersection of economics, gender roles, social commentary, race, political maneuvering and good old Chicago corruption. It’s one of the year’s few perfect movies.

4 stars.