Steve McQueen
Widows

With such premises, we all made a big mistake in judgment (and overestimation) in thinking that Widows could be a great film. To split hairs, even 12 Years a Slave already posed some not-so-positive premises. There, it was the “negroes,” here it is the women. The director of Hunger and Shame seems to have decided to embrace the cause of easy civil battles.

But at least the 2013 film enjoyed considerable inspiration and deep vibrations, it was as banal as it was heartfelt. Not here, the scenario and the screenplay do not allow for big stylistic inventions (there are some, but they are unnecessary frills) and thus it is reduced to mere narrative progression. This could also be a good thing, not everything is to be discarded, even in the merely expository scan of events. But the empty rhetoric that peeks through and the lack of an authentic reflection on the theme are highlighted precisely by the eminently narrative scan, which after a while finds itself having to live on expedients and twists, so unusual for McQueen, to get to the end without faltering.

Obviously, the filmmaker is not naive and, aware of the meagerness of the material, complicates things, makes them artificially more difficult and intricate than they are, with a very dense alternating montage and a certain reticence. He constructs a scenario, with many characters, innumerable premises, but in the end, delivers a mouse, a cloying hyperbole of the self-assertion of the female world over that of men.

And yet it started well, with the construction of complex, problematic female figures, open to criticism as much as their criminal husbands. A certain complexity remains; this is certainly not a crude film, but the broad structure that is erected ends up serving a very small objective. It seems that the director captures the complexities and contradictions of the relationships between men and women, but then he doesn't know how to critically interpret the existential scenario he sketches. Or anyway, he smooths out gender contrasts in a single direction. He gives up being a film to reflect on and becomes a mere thriller.

And, another demerit note, he throws in a potpourri of other trendy topics (politics, racism, violence), but only to please a certain audience. Emblematic is the sequence in which the police casually kill a young black man (linked to one of the protagonists). Totally disconnected from the plot, it smacks of a gratuitous addition for the sake of (deluding oneself into) being edgy, but without saying anything new on that subject. That's not how you do it; this is not political cinema.

Some blunders are even put into the mouths of the protagonists. Instead of being different, distancing themselves from the men who have devastated their lives, they do nothing but emulate them, becoming like them. And if this was meant to be a film supporting female identity, there is no worse way to do it than by making women emulators of men.