Review - English director Steve McQueen is the most unlikely candidate to be one of the best film-makers in the world.
His background is the art world rather than film school, and he translated those skills to unconventional films like Hunger, Shame and the Oscar-winning Twelve Years a Slave.
Now McQueen has confounded expectations once again by remaking a popular TV thriller from the ‘80s, Lynda La Plante’s Widows.
The original was set in Thatcher’s Britain. This new film adaptation by Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn is set in modern day Chicago and offers McQueen the chance to explore crime, politics, race, class, gender politics and four contrasting women in just over two hours.
Photo: Supplied
For structural skill alone, Widows deserves respect. Above all though, this Widows is an endlessly compelling story.
It opens on a passionate love scene between Veronica (Viola Davis) and Harry (Liam Neeson). They’re obviously well-off, but then we cut violently to a scene that explains where that money comes from - it’s a robbery that’s going very wrong.
Harry and his three associates go down in a hail of bullets, leaving four distraught widows: Veronica, working mother Linda, statuesque trophy wife Alice, and Amanda, the youngest.
They’re soon to discover their feckless husbands mostly left them with nothing, and worse, heavily in debt to the worst gangsters in the city.
The dangerous Manning brothers plan to move up to the big league – politics. To get there they need to take on the Mulligan family - no less corrupt, but better established. And close friends of Harry, it turns out.
When it turns out that Jack Mulligan’s glib assurances to Veronica are empty, she realizes the only way for her to get out from under the trouble she’s in is to complete the next robbery her husband was planning.
Veronica’s got Harry’s notes on how to do it. Now she needs her own gang to pull it off.
Steve McQueen, winner of Best Motion Picture for '12 Years A Slave' at the 2014 Oscars ball. Photo: AFP / 2014 Getty Images
So she turns to the other widows, who’ve all got their own reasons to need money. Alice and Linda agree to join forces with Veronica, but when Amanda turns them down for her own reasons, Linda brings in her hard-boiled baby-sitter Belle as driver.
The mark of a good director is, first, picking great talent – the cast of Widows is as brilliant as it is unpredictable – but second, listening to them.
Watching the likes of Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Broadway star Cynthia Erivo in her first movie and Robert Duvall in about his 90th, you can tell how much they’re being encouraged to bring to the film.
Similarly, writer Gillian Flynn is a worthy addition to the brilliant collaborators of McQueen’s films.
We’ve become used to seeing complex plotting and characterization in long-form TV dramas, but McQueen and Flynn have achieved something more by reducing it to movie length.
There’s something exhilarating too, in seeing so much wonderful material in a traditional thriller three-act structure.
This is the first movie in years you can talk about in the same breath as Chinatown, Heat or The Godfather. It really is that good.
The TV version of Widows inevitably went to a second series. I’m not sure whether I want McQueen to take on these great characters again, or if I’d prefer him to move on, leaving us wanting more.
But one thing I do know. McQueen will decide - he won’t be bullied by a studio. And that’s the other mark of a great director.
Photo: Fair Use / YouTube
