British director Steve McQueen teams up with best-selling novelist and screenwriter Gillian Flynn to create a heist movie with a difference. Set in Chicago, Widows tells the story of four women of different racial and economic backgrounds who are thrown together by necessity after their spouses are killed, owing a huge debt to a dangerous mafia figure. The film, which stars Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki and Cynthia Erivo as the group of impromptu criminals, was adapted from a 1983 miniseries scripted by the English crime writer Lynda La Plante. McQueen, whose film 12 Years a Slave won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2014, remembered seeing La Plante’s miniseries as a teenager. Rather than idolise the characters, he said, he’d felt a powerful connection to them as victims of circumstance, who received little support from people around them, as he explained.
Steve McQueen (English accent): It was something about those women, they just had a purpose. I had an immediate connection with them. They were being judged by their parents, judged of not being capable, as I was being judged as a thirteen-year-old growing up in London. Often I would project myself onto Sean Connery [as] James Bond… I remember recognising myself in these women.
IDENTIFIABLE WOMEN
Gillian Flynn is the award-winning author behind the film Gone Girl and the miniseries Sharp Objects. She was immediately drawn to Widows, she said, as an opportunity to bring authentic women of different life experiences together.
Gillian Flynn (American accent): Lynda La Plante had given us some beautiful DNA to begin with. One of the huge things in making it current in making it feel real was that I wanted these women to be incredibly identifiable in [the] present day. We wanted some of them to have kids, for instance, we wanted to see what childcare looked like in the middle of this incredibly dangerous heist. The danger and the fear and what it looked like when four women were coming together to make a team. And we also wanted to make sure that they were of different races and economic backgrounds.
WORLDS APART
The Chicago setting is prominent in the film; in one extraordinary shot, politician Jack Mulligan, played by Colin Farrell, makes a five-minute car journey from a derelict urban neighborhood to the gentrified, posh suburb where he lives. The camera remains focused on the surroundings, showing the contrasting experience of Chicago’s rich and poor living in close proximity to each other. It was this diversity that attracted him to the city, said McQueen.
Steve McQueen: I wanted to place it in a heightened contemporary western city and for me Chicago had all the things that I wanted to deal with: politics, corruption, policing, religion, the racial divide: Lithuanian, Polish, Irish, African-American, Latino... people shoulder to shoulder with each other because it’s so small… geographically, where everything is.
A FILTERED FANTASY
Viola Davis is the first black actor to win a Tony, an Emmy and an Academy Award. She spoke of the rare opportunity Widows offered herself and her co-stars to play real women.
Viola Davis (American accent): We revelled in the fact that we could play real women. You don’t often get that. You sort of start with yourself, and then you start to filter yourself down basically to become an extension of male fantasy or female fantasy. But the fact that Steve wanted real women to headline this movie I thought was very novel.
MAKING SENSE OF IT
Davis also praised the way the film made the extraordinary decision to rob a bank seem like a comprehensible act.
Viola Davis: I think it’s important to see that sometimes it’s a Sophie’s Choice. That’s when people do things completely outside of the box. But it also became a metaphor for these women taking ownership of their lives. Stories start at the core of politics, of economics, of subterfuge, of sexism, of racism… And I think Steve was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to tackle this giant.’
Oscar-winning British filmmaker Steve McQueen directs Widows, an innovative movie that places four complex female characters in an impossible situation. The film, set in Chicago, was co-written by screenwriter and bestselling author Gillian Flynn. When their criminal husbands are killed in a heist gone wrong, four women of very different economic and cultural backgrounds must work together to repay their spouses’ debt. Under pressure from a dangerous mafia figure, the widows Veronica, Alice, Linda and Belle organise a daring robbery. Academy Award-winning actor Viola Davis leads an excellent ensemble cast (Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Rodriguez and Cynthia Erivo), which also includes Liam Neeson as her husband Harry, and Colin Farrell as ambitious politician Jack Mulligan. Among other accolades, the film received significant praise for its authentic depiction of a loving mixed race marriage.