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‘Widows’ is An Intellectual Heist Meditation For Our Times
This review contains spoilers.
Viola Davis is a perfect actor. She evokes just the right amount of emotion each scene requires without spilling over into melodrama. She is elegant, like a rose emerging in the midst of a busy highway and leaving a light fragrance wherever she turns, no matter what movie she’s in. So the idea that she might get to be delightfully subversive for a change, to be imperfect, to escape the politics of respectability for a moment on the big screen as she has done on the small screen, was what drew me to see “Widows.”
Davis delivers a perfect performance in this not-quite-accurately portrayed heist film as Veronica Rawlings, wife to Chicago criminal Harry Rawlings (played by Liam Neeson [so mad at Key & Peele for making me think of his last name in the plural, damn you!]), which turns out to be the thing that, uh, shoots the movie in the foot, even while it is also the most thrilling.
The elephant in the room here, the backdrop even if I would rather not be cognizant of it, is that everything — from the movie poster to the palette of the movie and much of Veronica’s wardrobe, to segregated Chicago — is cast in Black and white terms. There is, too, the word widow and the rich depth of Viola’s blackness at the center of this Steve McQueen-directed and Gillian…
